Second St558 Blog Post
I completed my first project for ST558 earlier this week, and you can check out that project here. The purpose of the project was to write functions that manipulate, process, and plot data sets that come in a certain form. The data sets we worked with came from the census bureau. Through this project, I learned about different functions that can be used to parse and manipulate data. I also gained a better understanding of some of the video material around creating functions by putting it into practice. One thing I did that worked well for me was spreading my time working on the project out across many days. This allowed me to have lots (and lots and lots) of hours available to work on the project, which is important, as I am a slow, novice programmer. I also find that I run into a lot of roadblocks when working on programming assignments that tend to benefit from spending some time not actively thinking about them, so having time in my schedule to be able to step away tends to be pretty beneficial for me. One thing I would do differently in the future is to include more narrative text sections in my R Markdown file from the beginning. I misunderstood the requirement of having a narrative throughout the document, so I originally used a combination of text blocks and lots of code comments to form that narrative. Spending a chunk of time at the end of the project just to go back and split up code chunks to add narrative sections to rewrite things that I had originally written as comments was not a particularly enjoyable experience. I will now at least understand that expectation for the future, and it did make for a nicer looking, easier to read, final product.