R for System Adminstration

Just getting back from the most fun meetup I have been to in quite some time: episode 2³ (by their count) of Open Source Open Mic hosted by Matt Godbolt and Joe Walnes here in Chicago. Nothing but a sequence of lightning talks. Plus beer and pizza. Sounds awesome? It was!

We had fantastic talks across at least half a dozen languages, covering both new-ish (Pony) and interesting ones such (Rust, Go, …) plus of course some Javascript and some Python, no Java (yay!) and a few batshit crazy things like a self-hosting database in its own (shell) code, a terminal gif viewer (!!), and more. And it gave me an opportunity to quickly (one evening and morning commute) jam out a presentation about what is in the title: R for system administration.

And I am only half-joking. I had used R a couple of years ago when I needed to select, subset, modify, … a large number of image files given some timestamp and filename patterns. And given how well R works in a vectorised manner with both regular expressions and timestamps, as well as on top of essentially all standard POSIX-style operating system / file-system functions, I picked up that thread again on the problem of … cleaning up the file storage underlying CRANberries which by now has well over fifty-seven thousand (!!) tarballs of CRAN packages based on now ten years of CRANberries. So I showed how to prune this in essentially half a dozen lines of R (and data.table code), plus some motivation—all just right for a lightning talk. Seemingly the talk went well enough as quite a few folks gave a thumbs up and compliments over beers afterwards.

But see for yourself as the slides are now uploaded to my standard talks page.

My thanks to Matt and Joe for organizing the meetup. I think I will be back.