Tag: conference

The Mental Game of Python, by Raymond Hettinger

The Mental Game of Python, by Raymond Hettinger

YouTube recommended I’d watch this recorded presentation by Raymond Hettinger at PyBay2019 last October. Quite a long presentation for what I’d normally watch, but what an eye-openers it contains!

Raymond Hettinger is a Python core developer and in this video he presents 10 programming strategies in these 60 minutes, all using live examples. Some are quite obvious, but the presentation and examples make them very clear. Raymond presents some serious programming truths, and I think they’ll stick.

First, Raymond discusses chunking and aliasing. He brings up the theory that the human mind can only handle/remember 7 pieces of information at a time, give or take 2. Anything above proves to much cognitive load, and causes discomfort as well as errors. Hence, in a programming context, we need to make sure programmers can use all 7 to improve the code, rather than having to decypher what’s in front of them. In a programming context, we do so by modularizing and standardizing through functions, modules, and packages. Raymond uses the Python random module to hightlight the importance of chunking and modular code. This part was quite long, but still interesting.

For the next two strategies, Raymond quotes the Feinmann method of solving problems: “(1) write down a clear problem specification; (2) think very, very hard; (3) write down a solution”. Using the example of a tree walker, Raymond shows how the strategies of incremental development and solving simpler programs can help you build programs that solve complex problems. This part only lasts a couple of minutes but really underlines the immense value of these strategies.

Next, Raymond touches on the DRY principle: Don’t Repeat Yourself. But in a context I haven’t seen it in yet, object oriented programming [OOP], classes, and inherintance.

Raymond continues to build his arsenal of programming strategies in the next 10 minutes, where he argues that programmers should repeat tasks manually until patterns emerge, before they starting moving code into functions. Even though I might not fully agree with him here, he does have some fun examples of file conversion that speak in his case.

Lastly, Raymond uses the graph below to make the case that OOP is a graph traversal problem. According to Raymond, the Python ecosystem is so rich that there’s often no need to make new classes. You can simply look at the graph below. Look for the island you are currently on, check which island you need to get to, and just use the methods that are available, or write some new ones.

Raymond Hettinger: ” OOP is a graph traversal problem”

While there were several more strategies that Raymond wanted to discuss, he doesn’t make it to the end of his list of strategies as he spend to much time on the first, chunking bit. Super curious as to the rest? Contact Raymond on Twitter.

Python for R users

Python for R users

Wanting to broaden your scope and learn a new programming language? This great workshop was given at EARL 2018 by Mango Solutions and helps R programmers transition into Python building on their existing R knowledge. The workshop includes exercises that introduce you to the key concepts of Python and some of its most powerful packages for data science, including numpy, pandas, sklearn, and seaborn.

Have a look at the associated workshop guide that walk you through the assignments, or at the github repo with all materials in Jupyter notebooks.

One of the included exercises on data visualization:
https://github.com/MangoTheCat/python-for-r-users-workshop/blob/master/Exercises.ipynb
rstudio::conf 2019 summary

rstudio::conf 2019 summary

Cool intro video!
Thanks to Amelia for pointing to it

Welcome to rstudio::conf 2019

Similar to last year, I was not able to attend rstudio::conf 2019.

Fortunately, so much of the conference is shared on Twitter and media outlets that I still felt included. Here are some things that I liked and learned from, despite the Austin-Tilburg distance.

All presentations are streamed

One great thing about rstudio::conf is that all presentations are streamed and later posted on the RStudio website.

Of what I’ve already reviewed, I really liked Jenny Bryan’s presentation on lazy evaluation, Max Kuhn’s presentation on parsnip, and teaching data science with puzzles by Irene Steves. Also, the gt package is a serious power tool! And I was already a gganimate fanboy, as you know from here and here.

One of the insights shared in Jenny Bryan’s talk that can be a life-saver

I think I’m going to watch all talks over the coming weekends!

Slides & Extra Materials

There’s an official rstudio-conf repository on Github hosting many materials in an orderly fashion.

Karl Broman made his own awesome GitHub repository with links to the videos, the slides, and all kinds of extra resources.

Karl’s handy github repo of rstudio::conf

All takeaways in a handy #rstudioconf Shiny app

Garrick Aden-Buie made a fabulous Shiny app that allows you to review all #rstudioconf tweets during and since the conference. It even includes some random statistics about the tweets, and a page with all the shared media.

Some random takeaways

Image
Via this tweet about this rstudio::conf presentation
Some words of wisdom by Emily Robinson (whom we know from here)
You should consider joining #tidytuesday!

Extra: Online RStudio Webinars

Did you know that RStudio also posts all the webinars they host? There really are some hidden pearls among them. For instance, this presentation by Nathan Stephens on rendering rmarkdown to powerpoint will save me tons of work, and those new to broom will also be astonished by this webinar by Alex Hayes.

PyData, London 2018

PyData, London 2018

PyData provides a forum for the international community of users and developers of data analysis tools to share ideas and learn from each other. The communities approach data science using many languages, including (but not limited to) Python, Julia, and R.

April 2018, a PyData conference was held in London, with three days of super interesting sessions and hackathons. While I couldn’t attend in person, I very much enjoy reviewing the sessions at home as all are shared open access on YouTube channel PyDataTV!

In the following section, I will outline some of my favorites as I progress through the channel:

Winning with simple, even linear, models:

One talk that really resonated with me is Vincent Warmerdam‘s talk on “Winning with Simple, even Linear, Models“. Working at GoDataDriven, a data science consultancy firm in the Netherlands, Vincent is quite familiar with deploying deep learning models, but is also midly annoyed by all the hype surrounding deep learning and neural networks. Particularly when less complex models perform equally well or only slightly less. One of his quote’s nicely sums it up:

“Tensorflow is a cool tool, but it’s even cooler when you don’t need it!”

— Vincent Warmerdam, PyData 2018

In only 40 minutes, Vincent goes to show the finesse of much simpler (linear) models in all different kinds of production settings. Among others, Vincent shows:

  • how to solve the XOR problem with linear models
  • how to win at timeseries with radial basis features
  • how to use weighted regression to deal with historical overfitting
  • how deep learning models introduce a new theme of horror in production
  • how to create streaming models using passive aggressive updating
  • how to build a real-time video game ranking system using mere histograms
  • how to create a well performing recommender with two SQL tables
  • how to rock at data science and machine learning using Python, R, and even Stan
rstudio::conf 2018 summary

rstudio::conf 2018 summary

rstudio::conf is the yearly conference when it comes to R programming and RStudio. In 2017, nearly 500 people attended and, last week, 1100 people went to the 2018 edition. Regretfully, I was on holiday in Cardiff and missed out on meeting all my #rstats hero’s. Just browsing through the #rstudioconf Twitter-feed, I already learned so many new things that I decided to dedicate a page to it!

Fortunately, you can watch the live streams taped during the conference:

Two people have collected the slides of most rstudio::conf 2018 talks, which you can acces via the Github repo’s of matthewravey and by simecek. People on Twitter have particularly recommended teach the tidyverse to beginners (by David Robinson), the lesser known stars of the tidyverse (by Emily Robinson), the future of time series and financial analysis in the tidyverse (by Davis Vaughan of business-science.io), Understanding Principal Component Analysis (by Julia Silge), and Deploying TensorFlow models (by Javier Luraschi). Nevertheless, all other presentations are definitely worth checking out as well!

One of the workshops deserves an honorable mention. Jenny Bryan presented on What they forgot to teach you about R, providing some excellent advice on reproducible workflows. It elaborates on her earlier blog on project-oriented workflows, which you should read if you haven’t yet. Some best pRactices Jenny suggests:

  • Restart R often. This ensures your code is still working as intended. Use Shift-CMD-F10 to do so quickly in RStudio.
  • Use stable instead of absolute paths. This allows you to (1) better manage your imports/exports and folders, and (2) allows you to move/share your folders without the code breaking. For instance, here::here("data","raw-data.csv") loads the raw-data.csv-file from the data folder in your project directory. If you are not using the here package yet, you are honestly missing out! Alternatively you can use fs::path_home(). normalizePath() will make paths work on both windows and mac. You can usebasename instead of strsplit to get name of file from a path.
  • To upload an existing git directory to GitHub easily, you can usethis::use_github().
  • If you include the below YAML header in your .R file, you can easily generate .md files for you github repo.
#' ---
#' output: github_document
#' ---
  • Moreover, Jenny proposed these useful default settings for knitr:
knitr::opts_chunk$set(
collapse = TRUE,
comment = "#>",
out.width = "100%"
)

Another of Jenny Bryan‘s talks was named Data Rectangling and although you might not get much out of her slides without her presenting them, you should definitely try the associated repurrrsive tutorial if you haven’t done so yet. It’s a poweR up for any useR!

Here’s a Shiny dashboard made by Garrick Aden-Buie including all the #rstudioconf tweets so you can browse the posts yourself. If you want to download the tweets, Mike Kearney (author of rtweet) shares the data here on his Github. Some highlights:

These probably only present a minimal portion of the thousands of tips and tricks you could have learned by simply attending rstudio::conf. I will definitely try to attend next year’s edition. Nevertheless, I hope the above has been useful. If I missed out on any tips, presentations, tweets, or other materials, please reply below, tweet me or pop me a message!