For our July 13th 2018 LIBD rstats club meeting we decided to check as much as we could the useR!2018 conference. Here’s what we were able to figure out about it in about an hour. Hopefully our quick notes will help other rstats enthusiasts, users and developers get a glimpse of the conference. Although there’s bound to me more videos and material about the conference coming out in the following days.
Main links:
First of all search all the Twitter history for tweets related to the conference by checking the user2018 hashtag.
Next, check the videos of the talks. There are more videos there than we can check right now but we hope to come back sometime later and check more talks.
All of the #useR2018 presentations (unless specifically requested not), including tutorials are being recorded. These will be available at some point after the meeting, we think at this channel https://t.co/lq6E2XnXP9Live streaming is a challenge, hope to attempt one keynote.— useR!2018 (@useR2018_conf) July 10, 2018
Talks
From checking Twitter, we can say that there lots of great talks and tutorials. Here are some of the main ones we found in this hour.
Roger Peng talking about Teaching R to New Users got lots of attention. Here are some tweets about it:
.@rdpeng doing a better job of describing the #tidyverse design philosophy than I ever have! https://t.co/o3KunXe6qq— Hadley Wickham (@hadleywickham) July 12, 2018
Last day of #useR2018 kicking off with @rdpeng &quot;Teaching R to new users&quot; pic.twitter.com/yIJfiU7s8I— Luke Zappia (@_lazappi_) July 13, 2018
Here is the narrative from my #useR2018 keynote https://t.co/SbrlShNaDL— Roger D. Peng (@rdpeng) July 13, 2018
Roger Peng’s #useR2018 keynote this morning resonates with me, as another long time user/developer/instructor. Useful, opinionated take on where we are now in #rstats and how we got here. @rdpeng https://t.co/bOLSoaFupd pic.twitter.com/ejc9yFYGVA— Jenny Bryan (@JennyBryan) July 13, 2018
Jenny Bryan talked about Code Smells and Feels which was one of the major highlights. We wish we could have been there. Here are some tweets about it:
Code Smells and Feels^^ my keynote talk at #useR2018Materials at: https://t.co/e7dZRMZuSLIt was a great honour to speak and the Brisbane crew upheld the fine tradition of fun and informative useR! meetings 🎉 pic.twitter.com/2XkJ64NgsM— Jenny Bryan (@JennyBryan) July 13, 2018
A really nice keynote to close #user2018 “Code smells and feels” @JennyBryan #rstatshttps://t.co/3pzXUhE9xh pic.twitter.com/BCDcMPKfXj— Mickaël CANOUIL (@Coeos_) July 13, 2018
Check out her presentation materials on github
The talk was centered around the idea of writing good code. Using senses such as smell and feel as an extended metaphor, Bryan explains that coding is a sense that is developed through experience. Taking a very supportive tone, she provides pro-tips to writing efficient and effective code, such as writing simple conditions and functions instead of relying on complex function and “Tip #1: Do not comment and uncomment sections of code to alter behavior.”
Thomas Lin Pedersen talked about the gganimate package which seems to have included gifs in the talk.
First keynote for the second day of #useR2018. @thomasp85 &quot;The Grammar of Animation&quot; #sketchnotes pic.twitter.com/tvNjvbr4ag— Luke Zappia (@_lazappi_) July 12, 2018
😬 I said I wasn't gonna gif it, but I also don't want you to miss it…&quot;The Grammar of Animation&quot; 👨‍🎨 @thomasp85 https://t.co/t2HYRTtHwO #rstats #useR2018 #gganimate pic.twitter.com/YOyuNn5p1g— Mara Averick (@dataandme) July 12, 2018
Steph de Silva started the useR!2018 keynotes with her Beyond syntax, towards culture talk which covered different R communities and how we all interact.
Kicking off the #useR2018 talks with @StephdeSilva's keynote &quot;Beyond syntax, towards culture&quot; #sketchnotes pic.twitter.com/vgBsfOIFJU— Luke Zappia (@_lazappi_) July 11, 2018
Late to the party, I was a little busy: my slides for my talk #useR2018https://t.co/OzqcSTEx2v pic.twitter.com/RNnCm6K2ym— Steph de Silva (@StephdeSilva) July 13, 2018
The slides and video for the workflowr talk by John Blischak are already online too which got the big thumbs up by Peter Hickey!
Here are the slides for my #useR2018 presentation on my #rstats package #workflowr for reproducible research https://t.co/O2yZ7RemN6— John Blischak (@jdblischak) July 11, 2018
I feel like @jdblischak has read my mind with workflowr. It's like my current workflow but, like, actually good and reproducible! Will be especially great for collaborative and consulting type projects #useR2018 https://t.co/tZtqyH3sc2— Peter Hickey (@PeteHaitch) July 11, 2018
If you are starting out with the tidyverse, this tutorial about Wrangling with the Tidyverse by Simon Jackson seems interesting!
Great to meet everyone today who attended my #useR2018 #rstats tutorial, &quot;Wrangling with the Tidyverse!&quot;Missed out or forgot anything? Get all the material at https://t.co/YfYZBlkwMsSpecial thanks to @Rhydwyn @orchid00 and @SayaniGupta5 for their support too pic.twitter.com/5MnXLSQxq9— Simon Jackson (@drsimonj) July 10, 2018
Did anyone else think about the Diablo game with the deckard package? This new package by Verge Labs could be very useful when working with large datasets.
Introducing deckard for large scale visualisations in #rstats! If you want to hear more about it come catch us present this Thursday at 4:30 at #user2018. https://t.co/sIcd3ztqVl pic.twitter.com/ggu0N7JMWH— Verge Labs (@VergeLabsAI) July 10, 2018
Jim Hester’s talk about the glue package was highly recommended by Jenny Bryan. And more likely than not, you are using R packages that Jim has helped in some way or the other.
Slides for my talk at https://t.co/7JO8G1nQup— Jim Hester (@jimhester_) July 12, 2018
Thomas Lumley talked about fasteR: ways to speed up R code; check the video of his talk at YouTube.
Major takehomes:
If you repeat a task frequently, it is worth taking the time to optimize it for speed. (See xkcd cartoon!)
Packages are available to measure how “efficient” your code is, in time and/or memory. Options: microbenchmark(), Rprof(), system.time()
Reasons your code may be slower than necessary:
Dataframes are slower than matrices, data.tables, tbls, and lists
Vectorize your code whenever possible
Preallocate for the size of your objects, rather than “growing” your objects.
Linear algebra / matrix algebra functions can be much faster than alternatives because they are coded in C. E.g. for a large matrix, crossprod(scale(x)) if you know there is no missing data or NAs is many times faster than cor(x). If you know the linear algebra, use matrix operations when possible.
Packages exist for modeling large data. Example: biglm for linear models.
Thomas Lumley is a Rosalind Franklin fan :)
Miscellaneous
They made an awesome hex wall with the hex stickers from packages represented at useR!2018. It’s awesome!
The #useR2018 #hexwall has been revealed! Read about how it was created in #rstats on this blog post: https://t.co/krYYOQ3N84A huge thanks to everyone who has submitted stickers and provided feedback. I hope you enjoy the end result as much as I have had creating it! 🎉 pic.twitter.com/GnG9m2cZme— Mitchell O'Hara-Wild (@mitchoharawild) July 11, 2018
Controversial choice of wearing a #python in front of an #hexwall of #R #packages but hey, we're all friends! #useR2018 pic.twitter.com/rSG1EsH4Wi— Anna Quaglieri (@annaquagli) July 11, 2018
Here’s a blog post summarizing the conference from someone that was there if you want to check it out.
Last blog post for #useR2018. What a great week. Thank you to everyone who contributed. https://t.co/VA55cZz0VZ— Murray David Neuzerling (@mdneuzerling) July 13, 2018
It’s awesome to see the RLadies community thriving! A few of us didn’t know about RLadies Remote which everyone can join.
Here are amazing #RLadies from around the world having dinner after an excellent day at @useR2018_conf @RLadiesGlobal @RLadiesBrisbane @RLadiesSydney @RLadiesIstanbul @RLadiesIzmir @RLadiesAKL @RLadiesDC @RLadiesRemote @RLadiesMVD #rladies #useR2018 #rstat pic.twitter.com/aZoSuAU0Gi— R-Ladies Melbourne (@RLadiesMelb) July 10, 2018
These are some awesome socks!
Packed my own hex socks for #useR2018 pic.twitter.com/UxPcBp8CGh— Ben Harrap (@BHarrap) July 12, 2018
Sock party #useR2018 (trying again with proper spelling) pic.twitter.com/gI6zcbTzDW— Dianne Cook (@visnut) July 9, 2018
And who doesn’t love this image of Hadley Wickham being mobbed by deers? He even meme-fied it himself on this tweet.
People often ask why dplyr &amp; tibble don't support row names. I've (finally) written up my reasons at https://t.co/UmZjaSk7UX #rstats (photo credit: @hspter) pic.twitter.com/IVbaVmKhYp— Hadley Wickham (@hadleywickham) July 13, 2018
useR!2019 is already lined up, check it out. It’ll be in Toulouse, France! Follow them on Twitter at https://twitter.com/UseR2019_Conf.
Acknowledgements
We are greatful to everyone that tweeted about the conference and shared their materials online!
This blog post was made possible thanks to:
blogdown (Xie, Hill, and Thomas, 2017)
devtools (Wickham, Hester, and Chang, 2018)
knitcitations (Boettiger, 2017)
References
[1] C. Boettiger. knitcitations: Citations for ‘Knitr’ Markdown Files. R package version 1.0.8. 2017. URL: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=knitcitations.
[2] H. Wickham, J. Hester and W. Chang. devtools: Tools to Make Developing R Packages Easier. R package version 1.13.6. 2018. URL: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=devtools.
[3] Y. Xie, A. P. Hill and A. Thomas. blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown. ISBN 978-0815363729. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman and Hall/CRC, 2017. URL: https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown.
Reproducibility
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