First Warsaw R-Ladies Workshops were held yesterday! Over 100 R-Ladies have registered for the event! In this post I present notes from this meeting and provide some pictures of the beauty part of R. You can also learn a bit about the gender gap in the R community.

Heather Turner has addressed the gender gap during her presentation at the European R Useers Meeting. We have also noticed this gap on Warsaw R Enthusiasts meetups – the gap can be seen on Olga’s Mierzwa-Sulima (organizer) graph. That’s why Olga planned to organize workshops for R-Ladies.

After the opening, where we all gathered in one lecture room to listen to the presentation of our sponsor DaftCode (do you already know their Finger Hero game?), we all splitted to 7 small groups to start workshops. We prepared 4 groups with R basics and 3 groups with R ggplot2 visualizations. Sizes of groups varied from 5 to 12 people – with smaller groups is it easier for tutor to make a contact with the audience.

From this point I would like to thank our tutors: Katarzyna Sobiczewska, Marta Sommer, Natalia Potocka (all of them are presented on the picture below, looking from right), Przemysław Biecek, Olga Mierzwa-Sulima and Agnieszka Tomczyk. The last workshop was held by me – I’m not an R Ladie, but I could pretend I feel like one of them 🙂

Workshops about R Basics were very simple. We started with explaining the appearance and functionality of RStudio. Later we showed simple R structures like data.frame, list and presented atomic types of vectors. Finally we walk through easy data analysis with dplyr package – we applied most commonly used dplyr functions to analyze data scrapped from Allegro (market platform) that consisted of information about footwear category of offers. I am always amazed how new people into R are thinking about programming and solving problems – question about which R package is the best captivated me. The legendary question about the difference between <- operator and = was also discussed. After basic workshops I always appreciate the long journey one must make to be skilled in R.

Of course, it was not without challenges (not to say problems). Be sure to remind attenders to check whether they can connect to the WiFi on their laptops and if they could bring extension cord if possible. If possible assure that everyone installs needed packages and downloads required materials from the web before workshop where they might have internet connection problems.

After workshops we could get to know new people interested in R and provide useful tips on how to learn R during the networking at the after party sponsored by DaftCode. Thank you DaftCode for the sushi and drinks!

I believe attenders will also join our future workshops.

If you are interested in our future workshops then join our meetup group and check our materials from past workshops.