I appreciate you dropping by.

My name’s Simon. I build tools for data scientists at Posit (formerly called RStudio).

I studied statistics and sociology at Reed College, and had a brief stint in a PhD program in Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins. Throughout my career so far, I’ve had a deep and enduring interest in statistical software development—I think, done well, statistical software has an incredible impact on our ability to think intuitively about statistics and data science.

Most days, I’m working on open source R packages for data analysis, machine learning, and LLM code-assist. I’m also working on a book called Efficient Machine Learning with R. My GitHub profile links out to some of the projects I spend my time with.

I’m currently based out of Chicago, IL. When I’m not working, I enjoy cooking, hanging with my dog Millie, and playing American folk music.

This site is built with Quarto, and I’ve repo-dived on Silvia Canelón, Julia Silge, and Emil Hvitfeldt’s personal websites while tweaking and troubleshooting. The site is deployed using Netlify. My blog posts are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.