The code that never really worked This post is the result of hours and hours of me trying to write some code but never getting it quite right. I think that one of the worst things that you can do to yourself is to be scared to admit that you are struggling because you will end up never trying anything new. That is why I am publishing what I have got so far despite not being very happy with it.

Inspiration I was having lunch with some colleagues the other day when they told me about a restaurant spreadsheet that they used to use to randomly pick a place to get lunch from. I of course felt the need to see if I could create something similar in R. I had also seen a really cool blog post using the osmdata package to look at the number of pubs close to metro stations in Paris.

Happy Birthday To Me! Today is my birthday. To celebrate I decided to look at what was in the news on January 27 every year since I was born. Mainly I want to see if the news were positive or negative. Getting the data I start buy creating a list of dates. I feel like there is probably a more straightforward way of doing this but I am currently obsessed with map so this is how I did it.

Sundays When I woke up this morning I wrote a long to do list. Instead of working through the list I somehow ended up spending most of my day playing in R. Scraping the web I have been keen to try web scraping in R for a while so I gave rvest a go. I was a bit too restless to actually read any tutorials so I just started trying different commands.

Why can’t I just have all of the data? I have been updating some code that uses data that I don’t have access to. I used one of the data sets from the survival package but it annoyed me that the variable names were not what I wanted them to be and I couldn’t be bothered changing them. I was killing time on a train the other day and discovered the simstudy package and decided to give it a go.

Getting the data A couple of months ago I discovered a package developed by Public Health England that makes it easier to extract the data behind their fingertips website (https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/). I wanted to try it and as I like maps I decided to download some data at CCG level and make an interactive choropleth map using the leaflet package. I use select_indicators to browse the indicators and pick one at random that seems to have CCG level data.