Introducing multigitminder šŸ

Setting new goals is easy, achieving them is hard. I have used a variety of tools over the years to help me achieve my goals. I have used a combination of Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Keep, Loop Habit Tracker, Trello, and good olā€™ alarm clocks to schedule tasks and remind myself to get things done. Whether these goals were personal or professional, small or big, they would usually find their way into one of these tools with the hope that it would hold me accountable....

April 22, 2021 Ā· 9 min Ā· Hayden MacDonald

Refactoring squashinformr šŸ› 

In the early days of the pandemic, I wrote squashinformr, an R package for web scraping professional squash data. Iā€™m quite proud of the package, as it was my first real effort in creating open source. But when I wrote the initial version, I committed many cardinal programming sins. At the time, my approach to writing code was very ā€˜script-likeā€™. I kept code for my analyses in single Rmarkdown files that I would run from top to bottom....

February 15, 2021 Ā· 8 min Ā· Hayden MacDonald

Introducing squashinformr

Earlier this year, I enrolled in a Data Management course as a part of my MSc in Business Analytics. The final project in this course involved presenting a business case for a database and building a MySQL database as a solution. As a squash enthusiast, I chose to base my project on the Professional Squash Association (PSA). Long story short, I did not complete this project because it was cancelled due the spread of COVID-19....

May 4, 2020 Ā· 19 min Ā· Hayden MacDonald

Five R tips from my Voices.com internship

This summer, I had the pleasure of working as a Data Analyst Intern at Voices.com as a part of my MSc in Business Analytics. Voices.com is a marketplace website that matches business clients with voice-over talent. During my internship at Voices.com, I became involved in a variety of analytics projects. I committed to a customer segmentation analysis on voice-over talent, analyzed customer churn, built dashboards for core metrics, and designed A/B tests!...

September 8, 2019 Ā· 9 min Ā· Hayden MacDonald

Introducing hmdrmd

R Markdown R Markdown1 is a powerful R package that allows users to dynamically render their work (code, graphs, and text) into various file formats. Its wide range of outputs (including HTML, PDF, Word) makes it one of the most flexible and intuitive communication tools within the R community. Ultimately, R Markdown bridges the gap between data professionals and the audience they need to communicate to. In fact, Iā€™m communicating to you right now through an R Markdown document rendered to HTML....

February 21, 2019 Ā· 4 min Ā· Hayden MacDonald

Tufte Course & Visualization Best Practices

I recently attended Edward Tufteā€™s course, ā€œPresenting Data and Informationā€, in Boston. I learned about the course through twitter after reading about Tufte, who is a professor emeritus of political science and statistics at Yale. As a future business analytics student, I was very interested in a one day course taught by a data visualization expert. The most enticing factor was that it seemed to be the most design-focused course that I had read about....

November 11, 2018 Ā· 7 min Ā· Hayden MacDonald

The Case Against Young Link

Melee! Super Smash Bros.Ā Melee for the Nintendo GameCube was released in 2001. Since then, it has become one of the most adored games of the last twenty years. The game features many characters from various Nintendo game franchises, which players choose between before entering a match. The objective of each match is relatively simple: fight your opponent(s) and hit them beyond the boundaries of the stage. In contrast to fighting games, each time a player is struck they gain percentage points....

September 18, 2018 Ā· 13 min Ā· Hayden MacDonald