The message that put me on a train to Berlin

A year ago I sent a LinkedIn message that put me on a train to Berlin. Today the course that came out of it exists, so I would love to tell you the story.

R & Data visualization

I've loved R and dataviz for a long time.

Curating the R graph gallery for the last 10 years has meant I spend a lot of time looking at other people's work, and one name kept coming up: Cédric Scherer.

His charts are some of the best out there, genuinely. And all made with ggplot. Here are 4 examples, and there are plenty more.

I'd admired his work for years without ever reaching out.

Leaving my job

A bit more than 2 years ago, I left my job to become a dataviz consultant and course creator.

My first course, Productive R Workflow, went well. But it made me realize my goal wasn't to ship courses that maximise profitability. It was to build the best possible learning experience on the topics I care about, no matter how long it took.

That reframe is what finally made me write to Cédric.

Two weeks later I was on a 12-hour train to Berlin with a notebook full of half-formed ideas. We spent two days talking through what a ggplot2 course could actually be if we took our time and built it properly.

By the end of the second day we had a plan, and we started working on what is now ggplot2-uncharted.com.

A year of writing

We did a pre-launch in June last year and it went far beyond what we expected. I'm still a little stunned by that, and forever grateful to the people who trusted us before reading a single lesson.

Then we started writing, and it took much longer than we expected. To the early subscribers who waited: a genuine apology, and thank you for your patience. I hope what we built makes up for it.

This delay is because it's not the usual online course.

You have interactive sandboxes throughout, so you can run and tweak every code snippet live inside the lesson.

There are more than 100 carefully crafted exercises that walk you through the tricky parts.

And dozens of interactive widgets to deeply explore concepts. Check this geom explorer for instance.

Working through it as a cohort

After refining things based on student feedback, we run the course as a cohort so we can go through the material together, week by week:

• Week 1: Intro to R + Intro to ggplot2
• Week 2: Using AI with R + Customization and Styling
• Week 3: Labels, Titles and Annotations
• Week 4: Plot Composition
• Week 5: Visualizing Spatial Data
• Week 6: Interactivity and Animation

We also plan live sessions along the way, so we can meet, talk dataviz, and work through questions together. You have lifetime access to everything, so you can also learn at your own pace if you prefer. Everything is recorded.

The bottom line

I'm so glad I sent that message a year ago. I'm proud of what we built with Cédric, and I learned a huge amount in the process.

If there's someone whose work you admire and you'd love to collaborate with, send the message. The worst case is a polite no. The best case is a train to Berlin.

Any questions about the course? Just drop me an email.

The course is not only about ggplot2. It's also about dataviz in general, and how to work properly with AI.
Yan