I chose Hugo to manage this site mainly because it’s shiny and new. But there were some substantive reasons, too. Hugo is famously fast—really fast—but that wasn’t the big draw for me. For a personal website, even one with many years’ worth of blogging accrued, Hugo’s speed just isn’t that important. Quoth the Code Barbarian: being the fastest static site generator is like being the resturaunt with the cleanest bathroom: sure, I prefer a faster generator, but I wouldn’t pick one generator over another because one shaves off 100ms.... Read more

I can’t abide OS X’s built-in Terminal.app—too janky by half. So like any reasonable obssessive, I use iTerm2. Now, RStudio helpfully provides a menu item for opening a shell in the current project’s directory. But it calls Terminal.app, with no option to substitue an alternative. R-bloggers has a helpful post about this. But it’s from way back in the dark ages (January 2014), and the solution there doesn’t seem to work any more thanks to changes in iTerm.... Read more

For years I lovingly hand-coded my personal website. The ethos was pure, the product normcore: a single page, packed with links to my academic papers and other projects, all lightly seasoned with a sprinkle of explanatory text. I scoffed at the polished and capacious WordPress sites of my colleagues. “A navbar? With four sections?? Does that link to a PDF of your CV really need a whole page to itself?”... Read more