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

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