I’ll be heading to the 2016 ROpenSci un-conference (hackathon) in Brisbane later this month to smash out a heap of open-science R code. Ideas are already flowing quite nicely, and I’m confident that any ideas we don’t end up officially working on will get their chance in the very near future.

One thing I noticed from the organisers was that coffee won’t be provided in an official sense. As a physicist at heart, that’s strange (scary) yet understandable (physics conferences go through an astounding amount of coffee; we once had a full-time barista on deck). There are supposedly plenty of nearby places to get a good coffee, but where? Time for some R code!

This ended up being a little easier than I first thought thanks to someone already identifying the right Google Places API endpoint and providing an example function. I re-wrote the function to be a bit more general and to suit my needs a little better. After that it’s just a matter of extracting and plotting locations, adding a 2d density, and prettifying the output.

Where to get coffee; the R solution!

I’m loving hrbrmstr’s annotations additions to ggplot2; I think they really bring R graphics into a professional appearance. I have a feeling that my locations when not at the hackathon itself will correlate well with this density map as I try to find the best local coffee.

Stay tuned for updates on the projects we end up developing. I have a good feeling that they’re going to be somewhat awesome.

Suggestions on the above code most welcome. Also, if you happen to know of a great coffee house near there that isn’t listed, hit the comments section!