gta-r-user-group/gtar

The repo with all of the Meetup stuff for the GTA R User Group

The Greater Toronto Area (GTA) R User Group

What we’re about

This group welcomes new and experienced R users to exchange knowledge and experience on using R for data analysis, data visualization, data reporting, or any other interesting use case. Information on upcoming and past meetings, such as location and time of our next meeting, can be found on our Meetup page.

This package can be obtained from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("gta-r-user-group/gtar")

Code of Conduct

Please note that the ‘gtar’ project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

Materials

2020-12-09: Our First Virtual Meetup

• Tanya Cashorali talk: Anomaly Detection in Practice: Industry Use Cases with Shiny
• Yoni Sidi talk: {reactor} package for unit testing shiny reactivity
  • {reactor}
  • {whereami}

2019-09-10: GTA R Meetup

• Shreejoy Tipathy talk: Come for the machine learning, stay for the data science
• Sharla Gelfand Open Data Toronto:
  • Demo
  • Toronto Open Data Portal
  • opendatatoronto R Package

2019-06-04: GTA R Meetup

• Aaron Jacobs talk: Proprietary R Packages
• Andy Pryke talk: R in Production

2019-04-09: GTA R Meetup

• Dean Attali talk: useR 2017 attendance Shiny app and code on GitHub
• Morgan Taschuk talk: Making research software more robust and paper

2019-03-05: GTA RUG and R-Ladies Toronto Kickoff

• Rich Iannone: gt materials
• Sharla Gelfand: Opinionated Strategies for Uncharted Territories
  • Materials
  • Slides

gtar's Issues

Talk on Data Products, R in Production, or R Package Development in Proprietary Settings

Hi, I'm Aaron Jacobs, a Data Scientist at Pinnacle. I work mostly on the production/software engineering aspect of our R ecosystem, so that's where I'd be most comfortable speaking. And I've never given a public talk, although I have given a few at work.

I have a couple different ideas, so here are some attempts at catchy titles for talks I'd like to give:

• From Data Analysis to Data Products. Most R users start out by doing solo data analysis and sometimes trying to build models. How do you move beyond "I did this thing on my computer" to a "data product" that can be used by team members or others in your organization? What do these paths look like in R? How do they change as the demands on this product grow?

• R in Production: The Obvious Answer is the Right One. R had a reputation for a long time as impossible to use in production. This is a bit weird in my view, because there are clear implementation paths for it, especially with modern microservice design patterns. I'll also share some of my own team's experience running R in production over the last year.

• Developing R Packages in Proprietary Settings. Most guides and tools for working with R packages seem to be geared at open source (and especially GitHub-oriented) models. I'll walk through what things look like when you are working on closed source packages inside a company or organization. Some of the differences are obvious, and some are not.

• What Does R Value? I wrote a blog post on this a few months ago that I'd love to turn into a talk. Basically, I think that the "platform values" of a language community play a significant role, and it can be illuminating to name them outright. What values does R hold above others? How can the history of the language inform our understanding of these values? And what does it mean for the kinds of things we can build with R?

Does any of that sound interesting?

Directory structure

This repository is made first and foremost to store the information of all past meetups.

This repo is also set up to be an R package. As such, we need to make sure it compiles as a package, so we need to think about where to place all the meetup material.

I suggest one of two options:

1. Each meetup is a separate subdirectory under inst/meetups/
2. Each meetup is a separate directory in the root of the project, but with some common prefix. For example meetup-2019-03-05/ meetup-2019-04-09/ etc. Then the .Rbuildignore file can add a simple regex to ignore all these meetup folders

Talk Submissions

The Meetup group points to the issue tracker in this repository for talk ideas/pitches -- is that still correct?

YorkU MeetUP

We would love to run a grad student meetup to to explore
a. using GitHub
b. how to handle three variable challenges in R, ie plotting and working with x,y,z relationahips
c. best resources for learning new things in R