Technologies I Use
Notetaking
For electronic notes I use Obsidian. With my Bible notes I backup the Obsidian vault with git to a Gitea instance attached to a Raspberry Pi on my local network.
For physical notetaking I like to use a leatherbound notepad. Any notes I take from Bible studies I try to copy into the Obsidian vault.
Programming
I dabbled in Neovim with NvChad for a while in 2024, but keeping my setup up-to-date was somewhat tedious for my liking. I also discovered that the company restrictions on my work laptop limited the use of npm meaning some plugins would not function properly.
As a result and since the strong majority of my programming is with R and Markdown, I use RStudio. If I do something in Python or SQL, I gravitate toward VS Code for its better autocompletion and highlighting relative to RStudio for those languages.
Languages
Currently I use R and Markdown/Quarto primarily and Python when R can’t do the job. In association with R and Python, I use SQL both directly and through {dplyr} backends.
| Language | Proficiency | Experience |
|---|---|---|
| R | Strong | 2 years |
| Markdown, Quarto | Strong | 2 years |
| LaTeX | Moderate | 1 year |
| Python | Moderate | 1 year |
| Java | Basic | 2 Semesters |
| SQL | Moderate | <1 year |
| HTML | Basic | Minimal |
| CSS | Basic | Minimal |
| DAX | Basic | Minimal |
| JavaScript | Near Zero | Next to none |
Software
RStudio: This is my go-to editor for writing reports and apps with Quarto and Shiny. The open-source community is really thriving and makes the R language really approachable.
VS Code: I use this for miscellaneous code editing and any Python work. It is a good editor, but doesn’t fit into my usual workflow.
Power BI: I am not a fan of any Microsoft data analysis software. It feels restrictive to do anything outside of basic charts and graphs. I always feel that I am fighting the program to get what I want. Being locked down in closed-source, paid ecosystem is a big negative. The documentation is severly lacking compared to that of the R community.
Tableau: Similar thoughts to Power BI, but I have generally had a better experience. However, I haven’t used it as much.
ArcGIS: I only used this for a class. It was an alright experience, but I haven’t done any complex work to feel out the program yet. All of my mapping needs recently have been filled by
{plotly}and{ggplot2}.Obsidian: This is a good and adaptable notetaking software.
DuckDB: This is a good database software. I used it extensively in January 2025 and had no performance issue or major problems.