Some things about me

Hi there! I'm Danielle Navarro. I'm a data scientist, generative artist, and a recovering academic living in Sydney with my two kids and a Netflix subscription. Once upon a time I was a mathematical psychologist. Then I was a developer advocate. I've sometimes been accused of being a statistician.

Data science

I write a data science blog, "Notes from a data witch". It covers a variety of topics including R, Python, Apache Arrow, Linux, and many other things related to data analysis workflows.

Generative art

I have a generative art website where I post various art series under creative commons licences. For some series the source code is also available on github.

Academic work

In a former life I was a tenured academic. I wrote over 100 peer-reviewed papers and 4 books, and have an h-index in the 30s. I was even on the Board of Reviewing Editors at Science for a while. Out of habit I keep a (somewhat) up to date archive of my scientific papers.

Some things I'm good at

I've worked in academia and in industry, in technical roles and non-technical roles. I'm looking for work at the moment, so it seems wise to have a section briefly listing a few of the things I'm good at. Briefly, I'm a skilled programmer, statistician, writer, speaker, and educator. My résumé is here: cv.djnavarro.net

R, Python, SQL

I usually write data analysis code with R and am a skilled package developer, but I enjoy Python almost as much and work comfortably with SQL.

Technical writing and speaking

I'm an accomplished technical writer, able to write for many different audiences, and am extremely flexible in my approach. I'm also a skilled speaker and lapsed youtuber.

Git, Docker, CI/CD

I've worked in software engineering groups and regularly use git, GitHub, CI/CD workflows, containers, etc. I write about some of this work on my blog.

Scalable technical education

My data science education resources are designed to scale: entertaining blogs, videos, and approachable documentation target large audiences. Online workshops extend content to medium sized groups. In person training serves as a third, specialist tier.

Statistics and machine learning

I'm skilled in Bayesian statistics, linear modelling, and sampling based inference. I've worked with random forest models, and some neural network models. I'm also familiar with MLops principles.

Arrow, Spark, Kubernetes

I'm a contributor to Apache Arrow, have written extensively about it, and use it regularly for large data workflows. I've also used Kubernetes and Apache Spark.

Increasing developer impact

I've worked as a developer advocate and as a professional educator, am effective at communicating on social media, and have experience building communities.

HTML, CSS, JS

I write a lot of code for the web, in plain HTML/CSS/JS and with static site generators such as Hugo and Jekyll. I've also written R packages to wrap Bootstrap functionality and JS libraries.

Team and project management

I successfully ran my own research group for 15 years: skills for this include grant writing, budgeting, project management, mentoring junior researchers, diversity and OHS work, and more.

Quarto, Jupyter, Rmarkdown

I use literate programming techniques regularly in my work, including LaTeX and Pandoc as well as computational notebooks.

Some things I've created

A few of my favourite projects
A full-length tutorial on generative art in R released under a CC-BY licence, originally delivered as a workshop for rstudio::conf in 2022. art-from-code.netlify.app
A tutorial on larger than memory workflows in R with Apache Arrow created for the 2021 useR! conference. arrow-user2022.netlify.app
An open access introductory statistics textbook that I wrote during my days as an academic, teaching students the R programing language as well as introductory statistics. learningstatisticswithr.com
Together with Hadley Wickham and Thomas Lin Pedersen, I am one of the authors of "ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis". ggplot2-book.org
My data science slide decks — some of them, at least — are hosted at slides.djnavarro.net. They cover a variety of topics in R, Apache Arrow, data science, and practical details of project oriented workflow
My data science videos on are posted on YouTube: I can never remember the actual channel URL so I set up youtube.djnavarro.net as an alias!
An R package for multi-threaded task queues: queue.djnavarro.net
jaysire: An R package for creating web-based behavioural experiments. jaysire.djnavarro.net
flametree: Generative art in R that looks a bit like trees. flametree.djnavarro.net
bs4cards: Grids of bootstrap cards generated from R. bs4cards.djnavarro.net