I created govukhugo in my last couple of years working for the Cabinet Office’s Analysis & Insight Team. But in July last year I left that role, and government. But I’m aware, via sources1, there have been some requests within government for updates, including support for Quarto. So I’ve thought a bit about where next for the project2. This post has turned out to be a bit of a stream of consciousness/potted history of the development of govukhugo, so there’s also a TLDR summary if you want to skip to the end.

I’m working on a project where one of the outputs is a deck of Microsoft PowerPoint slides that act as a reference guide1. Outside of contents, introductory and annex slides the bulk of the slides follow the same format with a simple table providing metadata about a suite of around 90 indicators. Using the gtcars dataset I’ll demonstrate how I’ve used Quarto and the {officer} package to automate some of the workflow.

Last summer I started the development of {tidyods}, an R package for reading cells in ODS (OpenDocument Spreadsheet) files, and effectively a {tidyxl} equivalent for ODS files. After developing the first iteration of the package in June I left it alone, but I’ve recently revisited the package and refactored the code which has improved performance.

Back in November after the various developments with Twitter, I worked out how to get my Twitter bot to run on Mastodon. Since the Twitter takeover there have been various announcements from the new owner and official Twitter accounts about free access to the Twitter API being suspended, although these have usually come and gone without said suspension happening.

Yeah, ok, it’s late February, so a bit late for a “new year, new me” declaration, but I’ve been feeling like I should write a little something about… *waves hands in a generalised and unspecified fashion*. So this is a relatively short post about leaving the civil service last year, what I’ve done since and what I’m thinking about for the future.