The Art of Writing: Exploring the Joys and Challenges of Book Creation

Before Hadley Wickham became a pillar of modern data science, he was a spreadsheet-loving teenager making databases for his dad’s job. In this episode, he reflects on the early days of his involvement with R, the birth of tidyverse, and how real-world unpredictability — like a bear in a field — shapes data science.

What’s Inside:

• Hadley’s first brush with R code … inside a Word doc
• Consulting as a grad student — and learning what people really want from stats
• How messy Excel sheets inspired the tidy data revolution
• Writing R packages as a form of self-defense (and productivity)
• The secret sauce of building the tidyverse team
• On focus, burnout, and saying “no” to GitHub pull requests
• Current obsession: using LLMs  to make data science faster, easier, and more fun
• How writing books is a form of tidying ideas, and how a Shiny textbook led to a custom bike