Image credit: Results from the 2018 RStudio Learning R Survey, shared by Carl Howe at RStudio Conf 2019

Y’all if I had just one takeaway from R Studio Conference 2019, it’s that we are a friendly and tight knit community! Virtually and in person, we look out for each other.

This past week, the FOMO was real, both from those unable to attend the conference and those who came. There were so many great sessions and such excellent information floating around that it was hard to keep up.

In this blog, my focus is to share as much information as possible to help everyone feel included, ready to level up their R skills and engage with the community!

Learn

RStudio Conference Content

• RStudio Conf 2019 Slides and Links – Karl Broman did an excellent job at making the workshop and speaker information available on his github repo. He even laid out the material by track and included session timing and speaker links. Awesome work Karl!

• RStudio 2018 Videos – Mara Averick posted these links in the days leading up to RStudio conf.

• RStudio 2019 Videos – It appears the 2019 videos are not up yet. But when they do become available, I will post the link here too.
  

General R Content

• 20+ Free Online R Books and Other Resources – As part of my “We are R Ladies” curation week, I shared a number of my favorite free resources and then others like Matthew Hendrickson started sharing too! Being an excellent R-Laddie, Martin Skarzynski packaged it all up into a twitter moment for very easy consumption! Message Martin to add a free book to this moment.

 

Some of the books featured in the free online r books moment by Martin Skarzynski, myself, Matthew Hendrickson and others

 

• RStudio Cheat Sheets – RStudio offers oodles and oodles of amazing cheatsheets at this link with new ones coming all the time. Visit the link, download cheatsheets for your fave packages and subscribe to get all of the new ones sent to you as they come out!

 

Sample RStudio Cheat Sheets

 

• Tidy Tuesday Screencasts by David Robinson – Since late 2018, David Robinson has been posting screencasts of his analysis process on the #TidyTuesday datasets. These are an excellent way to learn how others approach a new dataset. They also tend to be a great introduction to new tips, tricks and packages. See more about the Tidy Tuesday program in the “Engage” section below.

• R Packages to Check Out –  As part of my “We are R Ladies” curation week, I decided to share some of the R packages that I find the most interesting. Check out the twitter moment to see a preview of the packages and links to tutorials or documentation. Message me to add more R packages to this moment.

 

Sample packages included in the #FOMORPkgs twitter moment created by myself

 

• Curated Gifs by Nic Crane – This lovely twitter moment is a great way to browse compelling R features or packages through a series of curated R gifs. Message Nic to add a new gif to this moment.

• Find R Content – If you are looking for a great way of searching for #rstats resources, look no further! The Rseek tool will search R issues, blogs, packages, twitter and more!

• DataCamp Courses – DataCamp offers a free, interactive “Introduction to R” course.

Engage

• R4DS Online Learning Community – As per their website, the R4DS online learning community is a supportive and responsive online space for learners and mentors to gather and work through the R for Data Science book by Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund.

• Participate in Tidy Tuesday – The Tidy Tuesday team releases a new data set every week for the R4DS online learning community to tackle! The idea is to use the set of tidyverse packages to clean, explore and draw insights from the new dataset. People proudly share their results on twitter with the #TidyTuesday hashtag.

• Twitter Community – Mara Averick and Data Science Renee posted this great list of some people on twitter to follow and engage with! Also, follow the #rstats hashtag on twitter for a ton of great content and discussion.

• Create a Blog – In the spirit of community engagement, David Robinson talked about the benefits of creating a blog in his closing session during rstudio::conf. He outlines a ton of great reasons as to why you should engage in public work. But he also covers a bit of the “How To’s”. Hint; use blogdown. Also, tweet your first blog to him and he will share it with his twitter followers!

• RLadies – From their website, RLadies is a worldwide organization whose mission is to promote gender diversity within the R Community. If you identify as a woman or an underrepresented minority, I highly encourage you to look for an RLadies chapter in your area or sign up for the RLadiesRemote group. Joining this group has been one of the best experiences of my data science career. The group offers so much inspiration and support. They have speaker directories, slack channels, meetups and more! If you want to learn more, they have an awesome shiny app that allows you to search for local RLadies chapters and see some of the program stats. RLadies was started in 2012 by Gabriela de Queiroz in San Francisco. The community now spans 44 countries, 137 cities and has 38K+ members! .

RLadies at RStudio Conference 2019. Photo credit to JD Long!

• Datanauts – The datanauts program is another excellent way to engage with other data enthusiasts in the R and python community. It is a program which enables the greater data and space enthusiast groups to engage with each other to solve interesting space problems. I had the good fortune to participate in this program in the fall of 2018 and I would highly recommend it!

More RStudio::Conf

Other RStudio::Conf blogs

The R blogosphere is already a buzz with the amazingness of the 2019 conference. I’ve already seen five blogs up and counting. I’ve linked to the ones I’ve found below, but please feel free to send over any new links!

• rstudio::conf 2019 takeaways by Jacqueline Nolis

• Feeling the RStudio::Conf by Julia Slige

• Why RStudio::conf is the best conference experience I have had by Athanasia Mowinckel

• Rstudio::conf 2019: lessons learned by Brooke Watson

• RStudio Conference Recap by Ryan Johnson

  
  

Next Year

Next year the conference is in San Francisco on Jan 27-30th, 2020. The first 100 ticket purchasers will get the special price of $450, so sign up now! A hilarious side note is that when the location was announced at the end of R Studio Conf 2019, they accidentally put an image of New York! That’s when the R twitter fans started creating their own version of the twitter fail. Martin Skarzynski captured the whole thing in a twitter moment. Great work Martin!

 

A sample of some of the rstudio::conf 2020 location trolling screenshots captured from Martin Skarzynski’s twitter moment

 

Thanks

Thanks for taking the time to read this blog post. I could go on further and on about some of the amazing sessions and packages introduced at the conference, but I already did that throughout the week on the “We Are R Ladies” twitter feed. If you want to learn more about the event, I’d suggest you look at the shared conference content listed at the top, read the other great blogs which I’ve linked to and buy your tickets for next year. Until then, keep learning and engage with the community!