useR 2013 was a blast!

I had a great time at useR 2013 in Albacete, Spain. The food was great, the people were fun and the weather was hot. A pleasant surprise was that I won the useR data analysis contest with my submission “Modeling Match Results in La Liga Using a Hierarchical Bayesian Poisson Model.” It was a fun exercise modeling football scores and I might write a post about it later, for now you can download my original submission here if you’re interested.

I also got great feedback on my talk “The State of Naming Conventions in R”. The message I was trying to get across was basically:

• Naming conventions are important.
• You’re not totally off if you use lowerCamelCase for function names.
• You’re totally off if you use UpperCamelCase for function names.

The talk was based on a short article I got into the RJournal and here are the slides:

Some more awesomeness from UseR 2013:

• Rcpp allows for seamless R and C++ Integration and is ready (talk by Romain Francois).
• Markus Gesmann and Diego de Castilo held a tutorial on the Google viz package. Hans Roslingesque motion charts FTW!
• Kimberly Speerschneider held a presenation on how to vizualize likert scales using the likert package.
• Richie Cotton held an interesting talk with the equally interesting title the Secrets of inverse brogramming. Like me he touched on naming conventions but he also gave a much broader view on how to write beatuiful code in R. The essence of his talk can be found in his very sensible R code style guide.
• The upcoming version of Rstudio boasts a graphical debugger and allows you to write presentations using markdown.