Quarto for Technical blogging

For blogging without thinking too much about blogging

Jon Minton

2024-05-21

Background and motivation

Data Scientist Curious About Software Development
- ~ 20 years using R
- Inscrutible Shiny
  - Software development at a distance
- Codeclan Software Development (Cohort E63) 2023
  - Python
  - Javascript

Separating the Challenges

Website
- Written in React
- Semantic HTML
- Hand coded CSS
- Little touched

Blog
- Written in Quarto
- Not perfectly customised but ‘good enough’
- Can focus on what I’m writing about, not how I’m writing it
- Updated most weeks (Currently around 80 posts)

What’s Quarto?

Successor to RMarkdown
Adjacent to Jupyter Notebooks

Language invariant
- R
- Python
- Julia
- Observable.js
IDE invariant
- RStudio
- Visual Studio Code

Output invariant
- file formats
  - html
  - pdf
  - word
- product types
  - Scientific notebooks
  - Manuscripts
  - Slide decks (including this, using reveal.js)
  - Generic websites and online books
  - Blogs

Chunks and Fences

Chunks for computing
- Mermaid
- latex
- Python
- R
- observable etc

Fences for styling
- Columns
- Sidebars
- Formatting and colouring

Getting started

Excellent how-tos on website
- Blog set-up
- Including how to deploy

Customising

All about the YAML/Frontmatter
Code chunk options
Styles/themes through bootstrap/bootswatch
Search
- Default
- Algolia integration
- Listing/Collection pages

In practice

Concluding thoughts

Good enough blogging platform
Low barrier to reentry
Abstracts away enough software dev complexity, allowing more focus on data science complexity
- Back to software dev at a distance (only now more through choice).