I kept adding things

In 2021, I had just started learning R, and coding still felt completely new to me. Most of the time, I was just trying to figure out how to clean a table, make a plot, or understand why my code suddenly stopped working. I spent hours searching for answers online, reading tutorials, copying bits of code, changing a few things, breaking them, and trying again. Little by little, some of it started to make sense. Somewhere along the way, I thought it would be nice to have my own place to keep all these things I was learning, so I could come back to them later.

I liked the idea of having an online archive that I could come back to later. My memory is not always great, so if I spent hours figuring something out, there was a good chance I would forget it a few months later. Writing it down seemed like a simple way to save myself from doing the same work again. And if I put it online, I could access it from anywhere. I also liked the idea that maybe someone else with the same problem could find it useful too.

That was how I ended up deciding to make a website, even though I knew almost nothing about how websites worked. At the time, I had heard words like HTML, CSS, domain, hosting, and server, but I did not understand how they were connected. GitHub was also still quite new to me. I started searching for different ways to build a website and found that I could use something like WordPress, build everything myself, or use an existing system that would give me some structure while still allowing me to work with code.

I wanted something in between. I wanted to be able to write normally, include R code and plots, and still have enough freedom to change things later when I understood more. While looking around, I also spent a lot of time visiting websites made by people from the R community. I remember looking at the websites of Hadley Wickham, Yihui Xie, Garrick Aden-Buie, and many others. Their sites felt like personal collections of things they had worked on over the years, with tutorials, projects, software, notes, talks, and small experiments all living in one place. I liked that idea, and somewhere along that search I found Hugo.

Hugo seemed suitable for what I had in mind. I could start with a theme, write pages in Markdown, include code, keep the files in GitHub, and slowly change the website as I learned more. At least that was how I understood it at the beginning. In practice, it took me around a month just to get everything running.

I spent many evenings reading documentation that I only partially understood, copying examples from other repositories, and trying to figure out which file controlled which part of the website. A lot of it was trial and error. I would change one line, refresh the browser, and sometimes the whole site would stop working. Then I would undo it, try something else, and break a different part instead.

Little by little, the structure started making sense. I learned how the Hugo folders worked, how Git and GitHub fit into the process, and how files sitting inside a repository could somehow become a website that anyone could visit. I bought a domain, connected it to the site, and eventually managed to put everything online using GitHub and Netlify. I was quite happy when edodanilyan.com finally worked, especially because the hosting itself cost me nothing.

After spending all that time building the website, I finally opened it and realised there was almost nothing there. I had been so busy figuring out how to make the website that I had barely thought about what I would put on it. I had only recently started learning R, I did not have many projects yet, and there was not much to show. So for a while, the website was mostly just an empty place except some lorem ipsum filler.

So I started with whatever I had. I added some story, then a small project, then another page. Later I added tutorials, figures, research related things, and pieces of code that I thought I might need again. Whenever I learned something useful, sometimes I turned it into a page. There was no clear plan for how the website should grow, and I think that made it easier. I could just add something whenever I felt it was worth keeping.

Over the years, my interests changed, and the website changed with them. When I learned more R, more R content appeared. When I started doing more research, research projects appeared. When I became more interested in data visualization, the website slowly filled with more plots, maps, and some other visual work. I kept exploring different things, and many of those experiments eventually found their way onto the site.

After a while, the website became messy. There were too many pages, too many sections, and too many things. Some parts made sense to me because I remembered why I had created them, but I started wondering whether anyone else could understand where to look. The colors did not always work together, some pages felt crowded, and sometimes I would open the homepage and feel that something was wrong without knowing exactly what the problem was.

Over time I started paying more attention to other websites. I noticed that some were easy and comfortable to read even when they had a lot of information, while others felt confusing even when they were quite simple. I became curious about what made the difference. That led me to read about things like layout, typography, spacing, visual hierarchy, UI, and UX, all things I had barely thought about when I first built the site.

Once I started noticing these things, I also started changing my own website more often. I tried different themes and colors, moved sections around, removed things, added them back, and rewrote the homepage more times than I can remember. I kept adjusting the navigation, the width of the pages, the way projects were shown, and all kinds of small details that I probably would not even have noticed a few years earlier.

Some changes worked well, while others looked good for a few months until I looked at them again and wondered what I had been thinking. Then I changed them again. I started enjoying this part of having my own website because I could keep experimenting with it. If I wanted to try something, I could try it. If it looked terrible, I could remove it. Every small problem gave me another reason to learn something.

After a few years, people also started finding the website. Every now and then, someone would send me a message saying that they had found one of my tutorials through Google or through a link somewhere. Some people told me that an explanation was easy to follow. Others said that my posts about learning R felt familiar to them and helped them when they were also starting.

I still remember some of those messages because they felt surprisingly personal. English is not my first language, and I know how tiring it can be to learn something technical while also trying to understand complicated English. Sometimes I have read an explanation several times and still felt that the explanation was harder than the thing being explained. Because of that, when someone tells me that something I wrote was easy to understand, I truly appreciate it a lot.

There is something heartwarming about knowing that I could spend an evening trying to solve a small problem in R, write down what I learned, and years later someone I have never met could find that page and use it to solve their own problem. I did not think much about that possibility when I started the website, so those messages still feel a little strange in a good way.

Other opportunities came from the website too. At one point, I worked on a company CSR project related to mangrove analysis. I also received some freelance data analytics work, and there were people who contacted me about research and paper collaborations after seeing things I had shared online. I find this part funny when I think back to 2021, because at the beginning I was struggling to understand how to put an R code block tp work on a webpage. A few years later, someone could visit that same website, look through my work and decide to contact me about a project.

There was never a clear plan connecting those things. I kept adding work that I cared about, and eventually the website became a place where people could see what I had been doing. That experience also changed how I thought about making the site easier to find. I eventually became curious about SEO, which was another topic I barely thought about before.

Initially SEO sounded like some strange internet marketing thing that had little to do with me. My view changed when I started receiving messages from people who had found my tutorials through search engines. If someone somewhere is searching for a problem that I have already written about, it makes sense to make that page easier for them to find. So I started learning a little about search engines, page titles, descriptions, site performance, links, and how pages are indexed.

More recently, the website has also become a place where I experiment with science communication and data visualization. I still enjoy analysing data, but I have become more interested in what happens after the analysis. I think more about how to show a result clearly, how to make someone curious about a dataset, and how to explain something complicated in a way that does not make people tired before they even reach the main point.

A lot of the things I enjoy working on now would have sounded quite far away from what I was doing in 2021. Learning R brought me into data analysis. Working with data made me more interested in visualization. Maintaining the website made me think about design. Writing tutorials made me think more carefully about explanation. Sharing projects made me think about how other people see and understand information. None of these steps were NEVER planned in advance, but each one somehow made the next one easier to discover.

When I started the website, I wanted an archive of the things I was learning. Five years later, I realised that the website itself had become part of that archive. Its history contains traces of me learning R, Git, Hugo, data analysis, research, visualization, design, writing, and many smaller things in between.

Recently, I saw a simple drawing that made me think about all of this. At the top was a long straight line with the sentence, “You can hold back forever because you’re unsure.” Under it were several uneven curves. One said, “or, you can give it a shot,” and the next one said, “and then give it another shot.”

I kept thinking about that drawing because it feels close to how the website grew. There were many moments when I did not know enough. I did not know much about coding when I started building the website. I knew little about writing when I started publishing tutorials. I knew almost nothing about design when I started changing the layout, and I was still learning data visualization when I started putting visual projects online.

There are still many things I do not know, and I think there always will be. If I had waited until I understood everything, the website would probably never have existed. Having something small that already existed made it easier to continue. I could make a page, see how it looked, change it, learn something from it, and come back again later. Sometimes the result was useful, sometimes it was messy, and sometimes I had to undo half of what I had done.

Five years later, I still work on the website in more or less the same way. I add something, notice a problem, change it, and then a few months later look at it again with a different idea. For a long time, I thought that at some point I would finally finish the website. These days, I do not think much about finishing it anymore. It has been changing for as long as I have been learning, and I think I am quite happy to let the two continue together.

Hey, thank you for reading this! See you on the next one!