Today I finished my first project in RStudio. I built a GitHub page through R that teaches visitors how to access an API, building user-friendly functions in the process, as well as performing exploratory data analysis.

When I first glanced at the Project instructions, I was both excited and intimidated. The estimated amount of time seemed like a lot! However, I was glad to be able to choose the API I wanted to access using a provided list. Initially I chose the Covid-19 API, but became frustrated when a network error lasted all day, putting the project on hold. Since I had only written a function to access the API up to that point, I decided to start over and choose the OneCall portion of the OpenWeather API.

The longer I spent coding my way through this project, the more I enjoyed the process of function writing, debugging, discovering trends in the graphs I created, and committing my thoughts to the R Markdown notebook. The most difficult part of the process was getting over the intimidation of using the render() function to render the document instead of using the knit button, as well as having to add, commit, and push my changes regularly to GitHub. In retrospect, these are both very easy processes that didn’t take much time or brain power, but the fact that I couldn’t visualize how these processes function made both tasks seem difficult at first.

As far as the logic and programming, I didn’t have much trouble. The hardest part was probably looking up new functions for data cleaning as well as making decisions about what contingency tables, numerical summaries, and plots I wanted to make. However, that was also the most fun. Imagining interesting comparisons between variables and then working to put together the necessary code to create the plot built suspense because I was excited to see the result.

If I were to do this project over again (which I may do it just for fun with a different API), I would become more familiar with what functions and options are allowed to be used when rendering a github document in R Markdown. I ran into a few issues with leaflet() and a few other functions that easily work in HTML output, but are more tricky to include in GitHub pages. Becoming familiar with these limitations would save me hours of Google searches in the future.

Overall, I really enjoyed this project, including the learning process as well as the final vignette I created. I’m looking forward to tackling more stuff like this in the future!

To check out my project, visit https://atbiggie.github.io/Project1/
To see my Project 1 Repository, visit https://github.com/atbiggie/Project1
To see the repository that hosts my blog, visit https://github.com/atbiggie/atbiggie.github.io