Erik Westlund

Using Quarto to Write a Book I’ve spent the last couple of months revising my Data Visualization book for a second edition that, ideally, will appear some time in the next twelve months. As with the first edition, I’ve posted a c...

Using Quarto to write (and typeset) a book.

don't tell anyone, but that is how everyone uses teams, whether they know it or not!

obviously use what works for you. But I've found a lot of python ipynb vets never really tried it. I had same reservation initially -- it renders a separate file! then I realized, oh, i can tell it to render to ./docs and use github pages to just... publish it and share. wonderful.

that's the beauty of it! I teach my classes with quarto-based presentations, I write statistical reports with quarto based notebooks, and I can create book-sized docs for software as well. all just text files of same shape. quarto may be "a mass of things" -- i've never noticed, bc it just works.

- 2 files: .qmd / .html
- html report can be shared w/ non-technical colleagues
- html gitignorable/stored depending on needs
- rendered html easily deployed to s3 compatible storage if needed, shareable as web site
- files easily understood by LLMs
- no repo bloated by large binaries

easy tradeoff

quarto:
1. data remains in memory just as it would in any other R/python/etc. workflow
2. easily renders to self-contained HTML you can share

all text.

every time

IMO for loops have been unfairly maligned in R. a lot of cargo cult thinking, people playing twister with their code to avoid them in contexts where they're good!

reticulating splines

my dotfiles are here github.com/erikwestlund...

I use ansible to set everything up, handle laptop vs desktop config, etc. Not gonna be something you'd wanna pull off the shelf but poking through will give you an idea of A. how linux can be great, and B. how it's not great for civilians

Arch+Hyprland via Omarchy. I love the tiling window manager + workspaces + hotkeys. Omarchy gives good base for a mac expat. For a more conventional desktop, or to avoid DHH's weird politics, I'd try Fedora or CachyOS. Claude Code is very good at building dotfiles/customization.

I'm daily driving for a few months now. IME both platforms are broken for doing basic things I took for granted on my Mac, but one allows and wants you to fix those issue and doesn't show you ads while you do.

I will 100% vote for the Noid.

technically correct is my favorite kind of correct
especially if, when pressed, you just get to say "Bayes"

It's hard to avoid recalling this passage from the English historian Tony Judt:

@rmcelreath.bsky.social www.jmspae.se/write-ups/ke... You were right.

the future is now