When you’ve written the same code 3 times, write a function When you’ve given the same in-person advice 3 times, write a blog post — David Robinson (@drob) November 9, 2017 Fun fact: This tweet is actually what inspired me to start this website. Secondly, he’s right, and we should definitely all be writing functions for bits and pieces of code that we are using over and over again.

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Loops are control flow statemtents that repeat the same code for a certain number of iterations. So, if you want to do the same thing over and over again, a loop might be exactly what you need. Loops often have a bad reputation among coders because they can be relatively slow and can also be confusing, especially compared to functionals (ex. apply() functions).1 But I can’t deny it, I really love loops.

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I get a lot of questions about the plots in my conference talks, and I’ve been promissing a post about them, so here’s a first shot. I love plotting, and have recently gotten especially into ggplot2 and some of it’s many options and add-ons. I’ll also include some stats here, to show how to plot the results of of linear mixed model. A hypothetical hypothesis Let’s say that I want to know: How does DJL (day journey length, see the intro of this post if you want more info about what this means) change over the course of a female orangutan’s development?

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Changing my data from wide to long format, or vice versa was somehow always a headache. Eventhough I did this a lot, it just DID NOT stick in my head for the longest time. Everytime, I had to google it, and then work through at least 5 failed attempts before I’d get it. Therefore, this totally warrants a blog post, ya? I recently started using tidyr’s spread() and gather() functions to do this, and I find them a lot more intuitive than the alternatives (the tidyverse strikes again), so that’s what I’ll focus on here.

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Honestly, I am not even sure what to title this post. I can’t remember what I googled that eventually took me to a website that answered my question, but I think it was something a long the lines of “re-level embedded list R” maybe? Anyways… the nifty trick that I eventually came accross that does exactly what I want is probably worth a blog post… Let’s say that I have a list of utilization distribution objects (each calculated using locations collected during a different year) embedded in a list of of different individuals (so, the list structure is Individual > Year > Object).

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