The Value of R’s Open Source Ecosystem

I was thrilled to be invited to speak at the Monktoberfest conference, held this past October in Portland, Maine. Not only have I been a great fan of the analysis from the Redmonk team for many years, I'd heard that it was one of the most interesting and diverse tech conferences around. (Also, beer.) And indeed, it turned out to be all of those things, and one of the most memorable and interesting conferences I've ever been to. You can find many of the talks on Redmonk's Youtube channel. There were so many great talks it's hard to single any out, but if I were to recommend three I'd go for: The Power of #FamilyOps for Women in Tech (Mandey Whaley); Oral Tradition in Software Engineering (Bryan Cantrill); and Why Do I Care About Microservices? (Brendan Burns).

My talk was about how the value of open source software lies not only in the software itself, but also in the community that forms around it. In the talk I recounted the rise of R from a niche academic tool for data scientist to become the lingua franca of data science. I also tols some of the stories from the things we did at Revolution Analytics (and later, at Microsoft) to help promote and grow R's ecosystem. You can find the slides here, and the talk itself is embedded below.