4 Comments
User's avatar
Soundarya Soundararajan's avatar

This reflection closely parallels my own R journey—it really struck a chord.

Because I too transitioned to R when returning to India from a well-funded postdoc, where I had access to expensive software. Moving to a context that demanded open, reproducible, and sustainable tools pushed me toward R—and once I discovered its power for visualization, I never looked back.

What you said about the "uncomfortable path paying off later" is gold. I’ve slowly expanded from visualization to data cleaning, analysis, and now Quarto for fully reproducible pipelines. It’s been slow, but the dividends are real.

So… I’d love to see more of your work! Do you share your R code or write about workflows anywhere else? Would be great to follow along or learn more from your experiences.

Expand full comment
Matt Kmiecik's avatar

Hi Soundarya! I'm so glad to hear that my R journey resonated with yours, and that you've found R to be a useful tool. I do plan to blog more about R here on Substack, but here are a few places where I've shared my work/workflows in R:

1. My website built formerly in rmarkdown but now Quarto: https://mattkmiecik.com/

2. A reflection on general R workflow over the years: https://mattkmiecik.substack.com/p/creating-objects-in-r

3. Here are some posts about data viz workflows in R: https://mattkmiecik.substack.com/p/named-vectors-in-r and https://mattkmiecik.substack.com/p/using-omnigraffle-for-publication

And stay tuned for some more R Substack posts! Hopefully we can learn more together :)

Expand full comment
Soundarya Soundararajan's avatar

Thanks so much for your generous response, Matt! 🙌 I’ve bookmarked all the links you shared—your transition from RMarkdown to Quarto and your reflections are especially timely for me.

Since we’re both passionate about R, here are some places where I’ve been sharing my journey too:

Academic website (fully in Quarto): https://soundaryasrajan.netlify.app/

Narrative-style blog on reproducibility and workflows: https://sound-reproducible-r.netlify.app/blog.html

Beginner-friendly R space for non-programmers: ss-myrspace.netlify.app

GitHub for sharing code and projects: github.com/soundarya24

Would love to keep learning from each other’s work. Your posts are already in my reading queue! 😊

Expand full comment
Matt Kmiecik's avatar

Incredible job so far, Soundarya! I love your passion for R, data viz, open science, and writing. Keep up the great work and I look forward to more of your posts as well. Thank you for sharing!

Expand full comment