Author | Lightnews

Eric Leung

@erictleung.bsky.social

860 followers 470 following 70 posts

marketing data scientist, generalist, math and library enthusiast, data scientist of the third kind, loves good stationary and pens, low tech enthusiast, open source tinkerer, opinions = mine #rstats

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Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · Sep 20

hello world!

lil about me, I'm a former computational biologist, working as a data scientist in media and entertainment marketing, and I like getting better at my tools and share those learnings.

I also love good stationary and fountain pens.

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Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · 2d

more maps by the author if you're curious

commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tw...

User:Twotwofourtysix - Wikimedia Commons

commons.wikimedia.org

Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · 2d

politics aside, it's pretty amazing to find high quality data visualizations for free on the Wikipedia page for the recent NYC mayoral election. and using a clever ternary plot to represent the breakdown of votes for three candidates in one color

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Ne...

map of the 2025 New York City mayoral race, using different colors to represent the three main candidates

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Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · 16d

yes yes! thanks for sharing your Libby fact. also, jetpens is indeed the best. I thought about a side project of scraping all their fountain pens and visualizing all the dimensions of pens (sizes, color, etc). never did, but I still think of it from time to time 😅

Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · 16d

maybe I'll add it to the Christmas wish list 😂

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Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · 16d

a fellow stationary and pens nerd! I got a retractable fountain pen for my birthday and it is just the best. I've seen this pen advertised to me, but I keep on telling myself I have enough pens 🥲 so tempting!

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Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · Oct 6

some example documentation

www.rdocumentation.org/packages/bas...

sQuote function - RDocumentation

<p>Single or double quote text by combining with appropriate single or double left and right quotation marks.</p>

www.rdocumentation.org

Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · Oct 6

i guess they could be useful to be consistent with specifying different quotes, instead of remembering which quotes need to be escaped etc.

either way, it's a "the more you know" kind of thing built into R

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Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · Oct 6

recently learned the sQuote() and dQuote() R functions

> cat("distinguish plain", sQuote("single"), "and", dQuote("double"), "quotes")
distinguish plain ‘single’ and “double” quotes
> cat("distinguish between 'single' and \"double\" quotes")
distinguish between 'single' and "double" quotes

#RStats

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Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · Sep 26

for fans of mcelreath's statistical rethinking book, it now has a wikipedia page en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statist...

Statistical Rethinking - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · Aug 6

thought I understood f-strings enough, untill I took this lil quiz. humbled me real quick fstrings.wtf

fstrings.wtf

Reposted by Eric Leung

Libby Heeren @libbyheeren.bsky.social · Jul 25

If you ask me for advice, the answer I give you will almost always be to reach out and talk to people. Not to read blog posts or watch youtube videos, though those are wonderful resources, but to meet with & talk to actual humans. It's not easy, and it takes time and effort, but it's the way #databs

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Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · Jul 24

been using forest sounds in the background for work. it's been quite peaceful

www.tree.fm

tree.fm – Tune Into Forests From Around The World 🌳🔈

People around the world recorded the sounds of their forests, so you can escape into nature, while in lockdown or unable to travel. Use this site to chill, meditate or do some digital shinrin-yoku.

www.tree.fm

Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · Jul 24

TIL you can make an R Jupyter notebook in Google Colab with this link colab.research.google.com/notebook#cre...

Google Colab

colab.research.google.com

Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · Jul 21

been dragging my feet on organizing my digital folders after finally finding this framework for organizing your digital.

in theory, i really like it. but with any digital cleaning, easier said than done.

anyone else have other systems they use to organize your life?

johnnydecimal.com

A system to organise your life

Johnny.Decimal is a system to organise your life. Find things, quickly, with more confidence, and less stress. It's free to use and the concepts are the same at home or work.

johnnydecimal.com

Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · Jul 17

i've been writing sql code for a while now, but yesterday i learned the acronym CTAS, which stands for "create table as select"

Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · Jul 17

been trying to get into using vscode a bit more, and had some of the keyboard shortcuts interfere with each other.

took me a bit to figure it out, but in case anyone else is having issues with it, go to File > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts menu

code.visualstudio.com/docs/configu...

Keyboard shortcuts for Visual Studio Code

Here you will find the complete list of keyboard shortcuts for Visual Studio Code and how to change them.

code.visualstudio.com

Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · Jul 17

turns out, tryCatch() in R is locally scoped, so if you need to change any variables, you'll need to make it more explicit with something like

assign("var_i_need_to_change", "change_to_this_value", env = globalenv())

stackoverflow.com/a/48391135/2...

tryCatch block in R, change value of outer variable

Here is my code. It produces infinite loop, because value of something variable does not change within captured error. Is it supposed to be this way? How can I fix it so that value of something cha...

stackoverflow.com

Reposted by Eric Leung

Randy Au @randyau.com · Jul 1

The #dataBS (Data Behind the Scenes) Conference Call for speakers is out! We're gonna do this!!

All online, single track, free to attend. Come talk about your messy experiences doing data stuff. At work, personal projects, whatever. A space to commiserate about nerdy things!

bit.ly/dataBSconf-cfs

Data Behind the Scenes Conf - Call for Speakers

What This Conference Is About "Data, Behind the Scenes" is a (free) online-only, single track conference centered on the real stories of data work from the folks in the trenches. We’re not here for th...

bit.ly

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Reposted by Eric Leung

Libby Heeren @libbyheeren.bsky.social · Jun 25

So freaking excited to have Cat Hicks on the Hangout tomorrow. She's keynoting at posit conf, too ✨ Go register and I'll see you there!! #databs

Event:
Posit Data Science Hangout with Cat Hicks
Thursday June 26th 2025 at 12PM Eastern/9am Pacific
Register for the Hangout event series at pos.it/dsh

Promotional graphic for the Posit Data Science Hangout featuring Cat Hicks, scheduled for June 26th, 2025 at 12 PM Eastern. The image shows Cat Hicks in front of a bright yellow background, wearing a patterned jacket and looking confidently at the camera. The left side of the graphic displays the date “26 JUN 2025,” and below the image is a short description mentioning Cat’s work with Catharsis Consulting and her expertise in the psychology of software teams.

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Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · Jun 26

so true. I've been doing the over documentation for a bit, but still working on over communicating

Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · Jun 25

better to over communicate than assume when working across teams

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Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · May 20

TIL about ggmosaic, an R package for visualizing categorical data haleyjeppson.github.io/ggmosaic/ind...

Mosaic Plots in the ggplot2 Framework

Mosaic plots in the ggplot2 framework. Mosaic plot functionality is provided in a single ggplot2 layer by calling the geom mosaic.

haleyjeppson.github.io

Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · May 7

i spent a whole day trying to get 5 lines of code to run properly. never have i had such a sigh of relief that it finally worked

Eric Leung @erictleung.bsky.social · May 7

following up on this, my problems is using recipes and workflows, and how parity between Spark and R is still being worked on and/or features even possible stackoverflow.com/a/68324650/2... but good to know that modeling is fine with parsnip tho!

Tidymodels + Spark

I'm trying to develop a simple logistic regression model using Tidymodels with the Spark engine. My code works fine when I specify set_engine = "glm", but fails when I attempt to set the

stackoverflow.com