“One can acquire everything in solitude except character.” ― Stendhal

The Interview

Tal Galili is, in many ways, a central spoke of the R community. Both gregarious and thoughtful, he has grown his website R-bloggers into the definitive aggregation of the R community’s voice through his genuine, passion-driven intensity. Tal had a simple desire as a young programmer – to learn more about his chosen tools – and looked to the internet to find other voices like his. When googling for “R blogs”, Tal found numerous blogs about pirates, but only a handful about R. This interview details how Tal started R-bloggers and decided to challenge the status quo, as well as giving us a peek behind the curtain for his new projects.

On Community

There was a time in the not too distant past where in order to get anything accomplished you actually had to know and remember things using only your brain, your books, and nearby scribbled notes. It was a terrible and dark time, where knowledge and access were asymmetrically given to the minds of a few. If you were just starting as a programmer and your code gave you an error it was oftentimes an insurmountable obstacle. You could, of course, ask people in your local community if they’d ever faced a similar challenge, but you were likely to find an answer only if you were lucky enough to have a community of like-minded people nearby and they were actively working with similar tools. Fortunately, the collective web has managed to lift the veil of darkness that once held back an individual’s potential for progress. Rather than being limited to what a single person knows or by one’s geographic proximity to approachable experts, we now find ourselves more limited by the latency of the HTTP request/reponse cycle or our degree of google-fu. Modern blogging can give everyone a voice. Sure, before the mid 1990’s it was theoretically possible for anyone to put up a web page and