r

Jumping Rivers is proud to be sponsoring the upcoming SatRday conference in Cape Town, South Africa on 17th March 2018. What is SatRday? SatRdays are a collection of free/cheap accessible R conferences organised by members of the R community at various locations across the globe. Each SatRday looks to provide talks and/or workshops by R programmers covering the language and it’s applications and is run as a not-for-profit event. They provide a great place to meet like minded people, be it researchers, data scientists, developers or enthusiasts, to discuss your passion for R programming.

Let’s get something straight, there isn’t really any trouble with tibbles. I’m hoping you’ve noticed this is a play on 1967 Star Trek episode, “The Trouble with Tribbles”. I’ve recently got myself a job as a Data Scientist, here, at Jumping Rivers. Having never come across tibbles until this point, I now find myself using them in nearly every R script I compose. Be that your timeless standard R script, your friendly Shiny app or an analytical Markdown document.

In last weeks post we tantalised you with upcoming R & data science conferences, but from a cost point of view, not all R conferences are the same. Using the R conference site, it’s fairly easy to compare the cost of previous R conferences. I selected the main conferences over the last few years and obtained the cost for the full ticket (including any tutorial days, but ignoring any discounts). Next, I converted all prices to dollars and calculated the cost per day.

It’s that time of year when we need to start thinking about what R Conferences we would like to (and can!) attend. To help plan your (ahem) work trips, we thought it would be useful to list the upcoming main attractions. We maintain a list of upcoming rstats conferences. To keep up to date, just follow our twitter bot. rstudio::conf (San Diego, USA) rstudio::conf is about all things R and RStudio

Can’t be bothered reading, tell me now Getting started Setting up R Opening ports ready for RStudio Installing RStudio Nicer URLs Adding SSL Can’t be bothered reading, tell me now Host RStudio server on an azure instance. Configure the instance to access RStudio with a nice url. Getting started Azure is cloud computing framework provided by Microsoft, the same idea as AWS by Amazon. In this post, we’ll describe how to use Azure to run RStudio Server in the cloud.

The prize How do I enter? FAQ Today we are happy to announce our Stan contest. Something we feel very strongly at Jumping Rivers is giving back to the community. We have benefited immensely from hard work by numerous people, so when possible, we try to give something back. This year we’re sponsoring StanCon 2018. If you don’t know, Stan is freedom-respecting, open-source software for facilitating statistical inference at the frontiers of applied statistics.

The {plotly} package. A godsend for interactive documents, dashboard and presentations. For such documents, there is no doubt that anyone would prefer a plot created in {plotly} rather than {ggplot2}. Why? Using {plotly} gives you neat and crucially interactive options at the top, whereas {ggplot2} objects are static. In an app we have been developing here at Jumping Rivers, we found ourselves asking the question would it be quicker to use plot_ly() or wrapping a {ggplot2} object in ggplotly()?

As time goes on, your R scripts are probably getting longer and more complicated, right? Timing parts of your script could save you precious time when re-running code over and over again. Today I’m going to go through the 4 main functions for doing so. Nested timings 1) Sys.time() Sys.time() takes a “snap-shot” of the current time and so it can be used to record start and end times of code.

Can’t be bothered reading, tell me now A simple one line tweak can significantly speed up package installation and updates. The wonder of CRAN One of the best features of R is CRAN. When a package is submitted to CRAN, not only is it checked under three versions of R R-past, R-release and R-devel but also three different operating systems Windows, Linux and Mac (with multiple flavours of each) CRAN also checks that the updated package doesn’t break existing packages.