Chronicles from useR! – day 1

Today I woke up for the first time in Aalborg. My colleague Enrico, who yesterday wrote the first post about this expedition, and I left from the hotel, walked through an underpass and came out in a wonderful park! In the end of this park there is the Aalborg Kongres & Kultur Center, the conference venue.

The first keynote speaker was Romain François, who shared with us some of his experiences with Rcpp, RcppParallel and dplyr. After that we had a tasty coffee break sponsored by Quantide. Then I attended the Reproducibility session, where I found particularly interesting rOpenSci: A suite of reproducible research tools in R by Karthik Ram and Simple reproducibility with the checkpoint package by David Smith (Revolution Analytics), whereas Enrico went to the Network session and his favourite seminar was Web scraping with R – A fast track overview by Peter Meißner.

In the afternoon I attended Computational Performance session. I admit I didn’t understand everything, but thanks to James Harner and his seminar Running R+Hadoop using Docker Containers I got an introduction to R and Hadoop; moreover I got some tips on good programming practices in Refactoring the xtable Package by David Scott. Enrico, instead, went to Data Management session, where there was the great contribution of Hadley Wickham, which made an interesting review of the most recent ways to import different kinds of data into R. For example he showed readxl and readr features.

The afternoon keynote speaker was Adrian Baddeley who dealt with spatial data.

Yesterday at the bus stop of the airport the first attendee we met was Friedrich Schuster, the first speaker of the Kaleidoscope (3) session, who talked about Coding for the enterprise server – what does it mean for you?, giving the important point of view of a software engineer to the R programming. Furthermore I found out the Architect IDE for R. Enrico attended Databases session, where the speakers presented several methods for putting R into connection with databases.

Now we go to have a beer, see you tomorrow with the Chronicles from useR!