I spent the last days of 2018-19 winter break in Austin, TX where I traveled for RStudio 2019 conference. I attended e-poster session and two days of the conference: Jan 17-18. Below I list some of the topics from the talks that I particularly liked and I think I am likely to benefit from in the future.

Also:

• The official repo with abstracts for every session, workshop (together with workshop files free to download for most if not all of them), and e-poster can be accessed here.

Data visualization

• Tyler Morgan-Wall (website, twitter) showing stunning gifs and pics while presenting “3D mapping, plotting, and printing with rayshader”.

  Features showed include shadowing, rotating, water transparency, visualization of a simulation of different water levels. The talk had possibly the most exciting “future work” announced - because who doesn’t get excited about the idea of “rotating 3D ggplots”? 💘 The rayshader package is available on GitHub (link).

  _{^{(The gif on the left and the image on the right are both sourced from ‘rayshader’ package GitHub website (link), as accessed on Jan 26, 2019.)}}

• Thomas Lin Pedersen (website, twitter) giving a “gganimate live cookbook” speech (and joining Tyler’s talk on the podium of most fun presentations, I guess 😂)

  The gganimate package was introduced per “extension to ggplot2” providing “implementation of the grammar of animated graphics”. Presentation slides are available online here; IMHO worth checking out for inspiring ways of presenting data over time! Besides, https://gganimate.com comes with a bunch of examples, like the one below.

  

  _{^{(The gif sourced from ‘gganimate’ package website (link), as accessed on Jan 26, 2019.)}}

Documents building

• Yihui Xie (website, twitter) leaving the audience very enthusiastic (or maybe more like: blown away) with all the recent development in document building.

  The presentation starts with “In HTML and the Web I trust” (😍 I share like 99% of my work summaries with advisors and colleagues in a form HTML). With pagedown we can now go ahead and get paged HTML documents, e.g. business card, resume, poster. Fairly 👶 development ("status: experimental"). Presentation slides are available here.

  

  _{^{(Slides 10, 11, 15, 17 from RStudio 2019 conference talk “pagedown: Creating Beautiful PDFs with R Markdown + CSS + Your Web Browser” by Yihui Xie and Romain Lesur on Jan 18, 2019 in Austin, TX.)}}

• Rich Iannone (website, twitter) introducing the gt package.

  With gt package (link), one can turn a data table into “information-rich, publication-quality” 🎯 table outputs. The table outputs can be in HTML, LaTeX, and RTF. The “modular” way of building these reminds me of ggplot2 plots construction. Presentation slides are available here.

  

  _{^{(Slide 5. from RStudio 2019 conference talk “Introducing the ‘gt’ package” by Rich Iannone on Jan 18, 2019 in Austin, TX.)}}

Community and personal development

• David Robinson (website, twitter) delivering a keynote talk “The unreasonable effectiveness of public work” (slides).

  IMHO a phenomenal speech: a kind and resonating talk after which one not only wants to stand up and change the world right now 🔥 but also maintains the same feeling a week after 💪. Review the slides to: (a) learn Author’s points on why it so worth it to spend time on public work, (b) for a pack of actual how-to examples and guidelines on building a public portfolio, (c) for a bunch of interesting points made about a value of work (Author’s work, but fairly generalizable IMHO); my favorite is copy-pasted below! I particularly appreciated that all stages of advancement in building online portfolio were addressed, 👶-steps including!

  

  _{^{(Slide 63. from RStudio 2019 conference keynote talk “The unreasonable effectiveness of public work” by David Robinson on Jan 18, 2019 in Austin, TX.)}}

• Jesse Mostipak (website, twitter) talking about the experience of building R4DS online learning community.

  Some empowering messages came in the lines of this talk - just look at the slides pics below to get the flavor 🙌. My take-home ones include a description of a data scientist: “constantly learning, constantly making mistakes, constantly learning from them”.

  

  _{^{(Pictures I took during RStudio 2019 conference talk “R4DS online learning community” by Jesse Mostipak on Jan 17, 2019 in Austin, TX.)}}