www.eamoncaddigan.net

commit a727ff5d4677c86ba399191f980be0b5a5db911b
parent afacb4914078e1a51f9da7add561a2600c955e3a
Author: Eamon Caddigan <eamon.caddigan@gmail.com>
Date:   Wed, 14 May 2025 20:45:58 -0700

Add weeknote for 2025-W20

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+---
+title: "Weeknote for 2025-W20"
+description: "Primers on WASM and R typography"
+date: 2025-05-14T20:14:13-07:00
+draft: false
+categories:
+- Weeknotes
+tags:
+- R
+---
+
+I broke my streak of “weeknotes”[^weeknote] and missed last week’s update. Many
+people will describe their lives as “busy” when pressed---I’m no
+different---but I was juggling a few extra responsibility and chose to let this
+one slide. If you’re gonna drop a ball, make sure it’s made of rubber, right?
+
+## An easy to follow WASM primer
+
+I harbor some ambivalence about WebAssembly, like many of the technologies
+underpinning the “modern web”. On the one hand, it’s amazing what we can do in
+browsers now, and the me that was updating an official university website by
+hand-coding HTML in 1999 would be amazed by it all. On the other, it breaks my
+heart to know that so many CPU cycles are being wasted on surveillance and
+advertising, or running apps “in the cloud” that could be replaced more
+economically by lightweight native applications. This isn’t a novel complaint
+in 2025, and I suppose anyone reading this has heard it all before.
+
+Still, I’ve wanted to know more about how WASM actually works, and this is a
+terrific primer. I doubt I’ll find myself writing a module in C, but if I ever
+have an excuse to do so this is where I’ll start.
+
+[ragman---Web Assembly Primer](https://www.ragman.net/musings/wasm-primer/)
+
+## Getting text right in R graphics
+
+[It’s been a while]({{< ref "/posts/tufte-plot/" >}}) since I obsessed over a
+typeface in an R graphic, but this primer recently published by the Tidyverse
+team is a satisfying deep-dive on the topic. [This older post on plot
+scaling](https://www.tidyverse.org/blog/2020/08/taking-control-of-plot-scaling/)
+from the same blog is an excellent companion if you want to make figures that
+look good for print and digital displays. Both lean on the [{ragg}
+package](https://ragg.r-lib.org/), which I don’t currently use but feel like I
+should.
+
+[Thomas Lin Pedersen---Fonts in
+R](https://www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/05/fonts-in-r/)
+
+[^weeknote]: I know that these aren’t _proper_ weeknotes in the indie web
+    tradition.