Yihui Xie
In the Middle of Nowhere
Omaha, NE 68022
Email: xie@yihui.name
Homepage: https://yihui.name
Hiring Manager
School of Ninja, Hacker’s University
404 Not Found Road, Undefined 0x1234, NA
December 32, 2018
Dear Hiring Manager,
It is my honor and pleasure to write a letter of recommendationIs this the first letter that contains GIFs ever in the history of human? for Dr. Emi Tanaka, a great hacker in my eyes.
Emi said it was heck of a praisehttps://twitter.com/statsgen/status/1023118510745038848 when I said Earo was a very impressive hacker. Well, the fact is that I have been actually impressed many more times by Emi, which is probably because Earo is a relatively low-key hacker, and I have seen a lot of cool things Emi posted on Twitter this year. If I were to write a full letter about them, it would probably take me two whole days. Below is a one-hour attempt to show the many ways in which she can be so cool.
She added the ninja themes to xaringanhttps://github.com/yihui/xaringan/pull/165.
The anicon packagehttps://twitter.com/statsgen/status/1021683550171496449 to insert animated icons or images or texthttps://twitter.com/statsgen/status/1010323499901075456 in R Markdown / xaringan / Shiny.
The datalegreyar packagehttps://twitter.com/statsgen/status/1018823773162618882 that uses a special typeface to represent data directly with text (which is an even smarter idea than sparklines). Magic.
She discovered the ultimate secrethttps://twitter.com/statsgen/status/1012664098616590336 of the “Infinite Moon Reader” in xaringan: when an HTML page is automatically refreshed, the scroll position is preserved. This is extremely helpful when the document is long or has many pages, because otherwise you will have to scroll like crazy to the position where you last viewed. This feature is quite subtle and has been there for almost two years, and Emi was the first person (to my knowledge) who had discovered it and been excited about it.
Obviously she is very good at hacking with CSS. Look at her xaringan slideshttps://twitter.com/statsgen/status/1009591310150299648 with the shiny (I mean sparkling) r-ladies theme, and the content is pretty good, too!
The joy over FiraCodehttps://twitter.com/statsgen/status/993662737099079680 (as it was supported in RStudio).
She wrote one of the bestest blogdown tutorialshttps://twitter.com/statsgen/status/993003327074926592 (the level of details is amazing).
And people truly appreciatedhttps://twitter.com/certifiedwaif/status/1029640487399915520 her blogdown seminar.
Her website is one of the most beautiful websites I have seen. In particular, everyone loved her showcase.https://twitter.com/statsgen/status/990422351593406464 Did I mention that it was actually one of the four websites I highlighted in the R Markdown bookhttps://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/basics-examples.html?
The shiny custom loader.https://twitter.com/statsgen/status/972727676459872256 Hahaha. Super funhttps://twitter.com/statsgen/status/975321139550478336, and magic.
She can teach statistics courses.https://twitter.com/statsgen/status/1001293550531694592 I barely remember what linear mixed models are.
And she just started answeringhttps://stackoverflow.com/a/51575804/559676 #rstats questions on Stack Overflow the other day! Thank you!!
Creative, enthusiastic, excellent taste of design, with great attention to details. That is my overall impression of this hacker.This letter was originally published in my blog at https://yihui.name/en/2018/07/emi-tanaka/.
Yihui Xie
Software Engineer
RStudio, PBC