Reading is hard. It’s a cognitively demanding task. Be kind to your readers, and write well.

I’m not impressed by your 40 page essay, when it could have been written in four.

If you have too much text on your slides, your audience will be reading and not listening to you. Use pictures, or less than 30 words per slide.

This isn’t a new phenomenon caused by twitter either. This has been going on for centuries.

As part of the Developing Data Products class at Coursera, we’ve been encouraged to share our R Shiny apps on twitter using the #myDataProduct hashtag! I tweeted mine and blogged about it already. I’ve also blogged about word clouds in R. And lo and behold, someone did both! @dscorzoni combined Shiny and word clouds into a nifty little app that takes a URL and generates a word cloud from it! How cool!!

I’m finally getting into GitHub, partially thanks to Coursera’s Data Science specialization, which requires it. Anyway, I blogged about my twitter bot, @AllTheLanguages, here and here, and now you can download, fork, watch, star, or whatever it is that kids do on GitHub to code here.

A few weeks ago, I posted about how to build a twitter bot. I wish it stopped there. Unfortunately, all code has bugs (ahem, I mean, features). There are two bugs in my code. The first one I understand, and could probably fix if I tried, but I haven’t because it’s probably more trouble than it’s worth. The second one I don’t understand, but I do know how to fix it. More »

A few months ago, I created a bot on Twitter. @AllTheLanguages tweets a new language from the Ethnologue database once every hour or so, and will do so for about a year. Give or take. Sometimes the bot goes down and I have to reboot it. And there are some other bugs too. But more on that in another post…

When I tell people that I made a twitter bot, the first thing they ask (after “why?”) is “how?” Well, today, I’m going to answer that! Why? Because it was fun! How? Well, it’s complicated… More »