The purpose of this blog

Hello and welcome to Time is Data, yet another R/data-blog.

I believe that if I am to embark on a project, there should be both some sort of a goal and a guiding principle to keep me focused - there has been more than a few aimlessly joined MOOC courses abandoned after only couple videos viewed. It turned out that learning new skills without a specific purpose in mind is an act of futility. Therefore Time is data is born, to provide the right incentives.

Or more precisely, that was how Aika on dataa was originally born (that's Finnish, not Elvish by the way!). It was a way to motivate me to properly get into R programming, something that I thought to be highly useful in long-term but which had no immediate use in my position at Statistics Finland. And to a varying degree, it has served it's purpose. After a couple months, I still find myself toying with R for my general amusement after work.

Goal of this blog is similar to that of her Finnish sibling/precessedor; to motivate me in pursuit of improved R programming skills, and to a lesser degree to show off my skills for the world to see, also called networking by some HR specialists. However, the guiding principle will slightly differ. In this English version of the blog I will take a more technical and programmatic focus, showing and explaining R code, putting less time on the actual substance and the data itself. My Finnish blog will then cut back on technical details and focus more on presenting the insights derived from the analysis and the theoretical background that made embarking on the specific analysis interesting in the first place.

A few words on the author, some of which might have been inferrable from text above. I received a social scientific education in university, majoring in political sciences. However already during my studies I delved much more deeply to the dark (quantitative) side than most of my peers, starting and almost finishing a Bachelors in Statistics. Even before graduation my career was set to be starkly data-centred and this is the road I have decided to passionately follow, currently finding myself at Statistics Finland. However, my social scientific background has left a deep mark in me as I always want data to tell me a story, hopefully backing a theory. My usage of data is thus highly practical and my programming somewhat quixotic, due to being for a large part self-taught with only couple computer sciences courses behind me.

A lot has been said about what I desire this blog to accomplish for me, less about what I hope it provides to the occasional reader. Internet is filled with brilliant R tutorials and blogs and I likely won't be able to compete with the best of them with the quality of my programming. This won't be a blog by a programmer for the programmers. However, I hope to bring another hands-on resource with the code examples hopefully easily digestable. And naturally present few interesting and motivating themes to apply the skills shown here!

The name of the blog is obviously a play on the proverb found in many languages. It was more phonetically pleasing in Finnish were "dataa" and "rahaa" (money) are more similarly pronunced.