These are the primary tools I plan to use in making this blog.
R - programming language
I have used many programming languages other the years, starting with Basic on the Commodore 64! (I was 7 years old). C++, MATLAB, APL, and Python received the most attention. But once I discovered R, it instantly became my favorite tool. With the tidyverse set of packages, R has the absolute best API for working with data frames and SQL databases, and the shiny, htmltools, and reactable packages can produce really nice web apps and html content as well.
baseballr - an R interface to MLB data
https://billpetti.github.io/baseballr/
Major League baseball makes a lot of interesting data available through the Statcast API. Unfortunately…public APIs can be a huge pain in the neck. The JSON format is functional but artless. And APIs require very precise documentation to be usable. Luckily, baseballr offers a nicer interface to Statcast data and some other web-scraped databases.
quarto - publishing data-rich documents from code
Anyone writing R or Python code should learn Quarto. It’s a rich markdown format for publishing documents, blogs, websites, dashboards, or even apps with a server back end.
GitHub Pages - hosting code and web pages
Part of my goal in making this blog was to improve my skills with GitHub Pages. I’m more familiar with a competing product, GitLab Pages. Turns out, the quarto command line interface makes publishing to GitHub pages extremely easy (quarto publish gh-pages), and I hardly had to learn anything at all.