This blog has gone relatively quiet of late, and it will probably stay that way for a while. That’s partly a function of my personal life, but it also reflects a conscious decision to spend more time improving my abilities as a programmer.
I want to get better at scraping, making, munging, summarizing, visualizing, and analyzing data. So, instead of contemplating world affairs, I’ve been starting to learn Python; using questions on Stack Overflow as practice problems for R; writing scripts that force me to expand my programming skills; and building Shiny apps that put those those skills to work. Here’s a screenshot of one app I’ve made—yes, it actually works—that interactively visualizes ACLED’s latest data on violence against civilians in Africa, based partly on this script for scraping ACLED’s website:
When I started on this kick, I didn’t plan to stop writing blog posts about international affairs. As I’ve gotten into it, though, I’ve found that my curiosity about current events has ebbed, and the pilot light for my writing brain has gone out. Normally, writing ideas flare up throughout the day, but especially in the early morning. Lately, I wake up thinking about the coding problems I’m stuck on.
I think it’s a matter of attention, not interest. Programming depends on the tiniest details. All those details quickly clog the brain’s RAM, leaving no room for the unconscious associations that form the kernels of new prose. That clogging happens even faster when other parts of your life are busy, stressful, or off kilter, as they are for many of us, as as they are for me right now.
That’s what I think, anyway. Whatever the cause, though, I know that I’m rarely feeling the impulse to write, and I know that shift has sharply slowed the pace of publishing here. I’m leaving the channel open and hope I can find the mental and temporal space to keep using it, but who knows what tomorrow may bring?
Dart-Throwing Chimp 