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!
paulvanderlaken.com 
