About

2023-09-18

My name is Yihui Xie. You can know more about me on the homepage and my vitae. This blog is about statistics, R, graphics, life, and fun, with a special focus on R. I often update my old posts (even after years) to correct errors and remove outdated information, so please don’t take everything for granted. All opinions expressed here are my own, and I don’t represent anyone else such as my employer.

Contact me

You can find me on GitHub (where I’m active almost every day) or Twitter @xieyihui or Mastodon @[email protected] (I don’t read social media often, so please don’t expect me to respond quickly or at all on social media). You may subscribe to the RSS feed of blog posts or watch the comments repository to stay tuned. I don’t like formality, so it is not necessary to call me “Dr Xie” when you email or introduce me. I’m a software engineer, so please don’t call me professor.

I don’t prefer people asking me questions about open-source packages by private emails. It is not practical for me to answer all of them (not even for the packages that I maintain). Emails often make me feel stressful in recent years, and I’m close to the point of email bankruptcy from time to time. I’ve reached “Inbox Zero” only once in my life. Usually I have about 100 emails in my inbox to which I haven’t been able to reply. However, I’m very happy to receive emails that don’t require replies.

Please don’t get me wrong—I do like questions, but I prefer seeing questions about open-source packages (like R) posted on Stack Overflow or Posit Community, instead of in my inbox. For any reason, if you have to ask me directly, please post to my public Github Discussions (you can ask me anything there if it doesn’t involve privacy). Please feel free to email me the link to your public question if nobody has answered it after a few days, and I’ll try to help you publicly. Knowledge should be open to the public whenever possible, and I’d like to use emails only for private conversations (more explanations in this post).

In short, I wish I could help you, but practically I cannot do it privately. I will truly appreciate it if you could use public resources before trying private emails or messages.

About this site

This site is created with blogdown (base on Hugo) and the theme is hugo-paged, a Hugo theme that I created to mimic the paged.js website theme. The Markdown source files are hosted on Github. When you read the blog posts, you can navigate to the previous post by the left-arrow key or next post by right-arrow. Please hit “Edit this page” in the bottom menu if you find any mistakes on the page to propose a correction through Github.

Statistics

R Language

My projects

Below is an incomplete list of packages and projects I have worked on. For a full list, please see my vitae.