TLDR; I wanted to apply my beginner R skills to a complex problem, and chose machine learning because why not. I managed to do well, but my lack of knowledge blinded me to the fact that I was kinda cheating, as I relied heavily on trial and error to rise the ranks. Despite this, I learned a lot about classification models and random forests, wrote more complex R code that the beginner stuff I had done so far, and enjoyed messing around and reflecting on the experience. All in all, it’s still a…

I’m not gonna lie, building a website, especially on a foreign framework, is time-consuming. Even the smallest of bugs can take hours to localize to a specific line of code or setting. Like most people who aren’t developers, I started with the best-known free option for building blog sites: WordPress. But the more I learned more about SEO and UX, the more agonizing WordPress was to work with. After a lot of hassle, I eventually trashed my old site and created this hugo-powered one.

I traveled a fair bit over the years, and have always been curious about just how much of the world I managed to cover. Well, what better way to illustrate my travels than to create an interactive map visualization in R.