#runconf18: My First rOpenSci Unconf Experience

 Posted on May 29, 2018  |  737 words

Last week I had the opportunity to attend rOpenSci #runconf18. It was a remarkable event, in which ~60 diverse people gathered to work on projects related to open data, package development, data visualization, reproducibility, education and more. But before talking about the unconf details, let me tell you my story with rOpenSci! I don’t remember exactly the first time I heard about rOpenSci, but I think it was around two years ago. [Read More]
R 

yelpr Package for Yelp Fusion API

Or My Story with Package Development

 Posted on April 8, 2018  |  1043 words

Today I pushed a preliminary version of yelpr an R library for the Yelp Fusion API, and my first public package. I am still working on it and intended to share it with others to get feedback. But I also thought about writing a blog post to tell my story with package development in general, and my thought process while developing yelpr. What was my journey with package development? When I started to learn R, end of 2015, I was benefiting from the great amount of packages developed by “others”. [Read More]
rstats  packages  yelp 

Stringr Explorer

What do you want to do with strings?

 Posted on December 31, 2017  |  515 words

A couple of days ago, I passed by Sarah Drasner’s Array Explorer. It was through a retweet by Emily Robinson, who proposed the idea of a similar app for working with strings in R. I thought about giving it a try, and I deployed a preliminary Shiny App Stringr Explorer; which is still under development. In the following sections, I will give a brief about the data extracted from the package documentation to use in the Stringr Explorer app, and I’ll be glad to get better suggestions and contributions. [Read More]
R  shiny  stringr  tidyverse 

Giving My First Data Science Talk

3 accepted abstracts after 3 rejected!

 Posted on November 17, 2017  |  948 words

A couple of weeks ago, I gave my first talk in a data science/rstats conference; Fitting Humans Stories in List Columns: Cases from an Online Recruitment Platform. It was at EARL Boston and it was a good experience as I received positive feedback from the attendees. I intended to write about the story I shared in my talk. But then I recalled Emily Robinson’s post Giving Your First Data Science Talk, published last July. [Read More]
rstats 

Adding Skimr Spark Histograms in Dataframe Columns

 Posted on September 15, 2017  |  746 words

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for a package, I previously passed by, that prints summary statistics with inline histograms. I checked all my bookmarks and liked tweets, but I couldn’t find it! So I asked on twitter. fortunately Maëlle Salmon read the tweet and guided me to skimr by ropenscilabs, who actually release many useful packages. In this post, I will focus on spark histograms in summary statistics and beyond. [Read More]
R  skimr  purrr  tidyverse 

My First Steps into The World of Tidy Eval

Bang Bang!!

 Posted on August 12, 2017  |  1493 words

A couple of months ago, Tidy eval was something that I passed by, but didn’t have time to explore. As usual, sometimes one gets busy with the daily work, and puts some stuff aside to come back to. However, I like to find ways that give me a higher level of flexibility and more control. So mid June, I had an inquiry regarding programming around dplyr. I wasn’t sure how to pass a variable column names to purrr::map, so I opened an issue; purrr::map() support for SE/variable column names? [Read More]
R  Tidyeval 

Highlights from UseR! 2017

Teaching R to new UseRs, the journey of package development, and more!

 Posted on July 12, 2017  |  711 words

In the first week of July, the 14th UseR! conference took place in Brussels as the biggest UseR!. For me, it was the first UseR! and I believe it was a good opportunity to get exposed to different approaches in the data world, see different applications, learn about new packages and meet people in the R community, all in one place. There were lots of interesting things to be highlighted. However, in this post, I will just refer to some talks about teaching R, the journey of package development and contributing to the R community. [Read More]
R  UseR 

R Questions Tag Pairs on Stackoverflow

 Posted on May 6, 2017  |  605 words

Months ago, I passed by R Questions from Stack Overflow published on Kaggle. I was interested in tag pairs in particular, i.e. which tags appear together in R questions, so I worked on this simple kernel. This week, I had some time so I thought about deploying a simple Shiny App, to give more people access to exploring the tag pairs. So here is the App, where you can see the most frequent tags that appear with a certain tag. [Read More]

Prophet Explore: A Simple Shiny App to Get Introduced to Prophet

 Posted on April 17, 2017  |  290 words

Last February, I read about prophet package, which was released by Facebook’s Core Data Science team. I skimmed the published paper Forecasting at Scale quickly and I got the main concept. I also liked how the creators; Sean Taylor and Ben Letham were trying to empower analysts to produce high quality forecasts by offering them a flexible and configurable model that requires general understanding, but not necessarily deep knowledge about time series models. [Read More]

A Glimpse into The Daily Life of a Data Scientist

 Posted on January 25, 2017  |  1639 words

A couple of weeks ago, I had a discussion with a co-worker regarding a project I was involved in, I felt that there was no clear understanding of the daily challenges data scientists face. Few days later, I was at Rstudio::Conf 2017 where I met lots of data scientists from academia and industry. Later on, I described one of the conference’s positive side effects as “group therapy”, where one could see how others face the same challenges and struggle with similar issues. [Read More]