Welcome to “Buckets & Bytes”! If you’re into college basketball and curious about how data visualization can elevate your understanding of the game, you’re right where you need to be. My name is Andrew Weatherman, and I am an R enthusiast and college basketball fanatic.
My journey with R started in the thick of COVID, with self-learning at the core, aided immensely by hands-on tutorials that made sense of complex data. It was a blend of passion, persistence, and a touch of trial and error.
Here, we’re taking a leaf out of Owen Phillips’ book, inspired by his incredible blog, The F5. We'll be exploring the world of college basketball through the lens of R programming, backed by a wealth of open-source data.
Each post here is two-fold: offering you insightful visualizations and giving you access to the source code. It’s about demystifying the process, unraveling the ‘why’ and ‘how’ behind each piece of code, aiming to arm you with the skills to forge your own path in analytics.
Who is this for?
The explanations in Buckets & Bytes will assume some foundational understanding of R. You need not be an expert by any means, but it would be helpful to have a grasp of core principles. Buckets & Bytes will walk through every step — start to finish — but for brevity, some basic knowledge will be assumed. If you are at least a few weeks into your R journey, Buckets & Bytes will be the perfect learning companion. If you are more advanced, you might still find the visualization code and accompanying walk-through helpful!
But I don’t like basketball
That’s okay! The data we will be using is mostly basketball, yes, but the concepts and skills are applicable across all fields. Feel free to bring your own data and make spin-offs of the visualizations!
I have questions about the code
Please don’t be scared to reach out! You can find me on Twitter (I will never call it X), and my DMs are always open. I would be more than happy to answer any questions and provide deeper explanations where needed.
When do you post?
My hope is to post once per week, but I’m also a full-time student, with outside obligations, and applying to graduate schools — so in reality, it will be whenever I have the time.
How can I support you?
Subscribe and share the blog! If you have feedback, you can leave a comment on the article itself, tweet me, or shoot me a direct message on Twitter.
Buckets & Bytes is completely free! I’m doing this because I genuinely learned so much from Owen Phillips’ The F5 and want to offer an alternative now that The F5 is over.
If you feel so inclined, however, you can leave a small “tip” on my KoFi page. Anything is very much appreciated.
So, let’s get to it. Your deep dive into the intricate dance between college basketball and data analytics starts now.