Rcpp master class in New York last weekend

The weekend started with a slight disappointment. I had taken Friday off, and hoped to reach NY by early afternoon to join JJ there, and to spend the afternoon with the RStan team. However, the tail end of last week’s snowstorm made it such that we both got to Columbia’s stats department closer to 6pm rather than 1pm, and half the team had left. Dang. Very frustrating travel experience. We salvaged the evening by gabbing over a cold beverage or two, before sharing some sacred New York pizza with Wes McKinney and Jared.

The class itself on Saturday went quite well. With JJ on deck, we were able to have every participant log into an EC2-hosted instance of RStudio Server, which worked very well for usage examples of Rcpp. It has been almost a year since I last taught the class, and many exciting things–such as Rcpp attributes, added by JJ himself–have appeared, which made it extra fun. Participants were rather kind with praise. Either they really liked it, or they really are hard-nosed New Yorkers who manage to lie to my face without me noticing.

We ended the day with some hard-earned cold beverages, followed by some dinner at Sylvia’s (as tweeted by Jared) followed by more drinks. Ended up a little past my usual bedtime, but I managed to get out and enjoy a lovely 6.5 miles run across Central Park the next morning before leaving town.

All in all, a very nice weekend, the travel horror of Friday notwithstanding. And who know, maybe we’ll just do it again another time…