One of the best things about learning R is that no matter your skill level, there is always someone who can benefit from your experience. Topics in R ranging from complicated machine learning approaches to calculating a mean all find their relevant audiences. This is particularly true when writing R ...

Karthik Ram is a Data Scientist at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and Berkeley Institute for Global Change Biology. He is a co-founder of rOpenSci, a collective to support the development of R-based tools which facilitate open science and access to open data. In this interview, Karthik and I ...

Jenny Bryan @JennyBryan is a Software Engineer at RStudio and is on leave from being an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. Jenny serves in leadership positions with rOpenSci and Forwards and as an Ordinary member of The R Foundation. KO: What is your name, your title, and ...

This week magick 1.6 appeared on CRAN. This release is a big all-round maintenance update with lots of tweaks and improvements across the package. The NEWS file gives an overview of changes in this version. In this post we highlight some changes. library(magick) stopifnot(packageVersion('magick') __= 1.6) If you are new ...

Introduction When I was in grad school at Emory, I had a favorite desk in the library. The desk wasn’t particularly cozy or private, but what it lacked in comfort it made up for in real estate. My books and I needed room to operate. Students of the ancient ...

I’ve raved about the value of extending a personalized welcome to new community members and I recently shared six tips for running a successful hackathon-flavoured unconference. Building on these, I’d like to share the specific approach and (free!) tools I used to help prepare new rOpenSci community members ...

Are you new to version control and always running into trouble with Git? Or are you a seasoned user, haunted by the traumas of learning Git and reliving them whilst trying to teach it to others? Yeah, us too. Git is a version control tool designed for software development, and ...

The second rOpenSci OzUnConf was held in Melbourne Australia a few weeks ago. A diverse range of scientists, developers and general good-eggs came together to make some R-magic happen and also learn a lot along the way. Before the conference began, a huge stack of projects were suggested on the ...

Attendees at the May 2017 rOpenSci unconference. Photo credit: Nistara Randhawa In May 2017, I helped run a wildly successful “unconference” that had a huge positive impact on the community I serve. rOpenSci is a non-profit in...

Mara Averick is a non-profit data nerd, NBA stats junkie, and most recently, tidyverse developer advocate at RStudio. She is the voice behind two very popular Twitter accounts, @dataandme and @batpigandme. Mara and I discussed sports analytics, how attending a cool conference can change the approach to your career, and ...

This week magick 1.5 appeared on CRAN. The latest update adds support for using images in knitr documents and shiny apps. In this post we show how this nicely ties together a reproducible image workflow in R, from source image or plot directly into your report or application. library(magick) stopifnot(...

Just last week we organised the 2nd rOpenSci ozunconference, the sibling rOpenSci unconference, held in Australia. Last year it was held in Brisbane, this time around, the ozunconf was hosted in Melbourne, from October 27-27, 2017. At the ozunconf, we brought together 45 R-software users and developers, scientists, and open data enthusiasts ...

A new rOpenSci package provides access to data to which users may already have directly contributed, and for which contribution is fun, keeps you fit, and helps make the world a better place. The data come from using public bicycle hire schemes, and the package is called bikedata. Public bicycle ...

David Smith is a Blogger and Community Lead at Microsoft. I had the chance to interview David last May at rOpenSci unconf17. We spoke about his career, the process of working remote within a team, community development/outreach and his personal methods for discovering great content to share and write ...