As I spent an exciting day at satRday conference in Amsterdam I would like to share with you my thoughts.
TL;DR: Event was cool, my presentation went fine ????

General

Wow, I don’t remember an event where I had so much fun. From most of the talks, I took out something valuable. People were really friendly & open, I believe that I’ll keep in touch with many of them. R community always surprises me with how welcome they are.

Talks

– That’s not [data] science! – Mara Averick (@dataandme) – I must admit that her talk was pure entertainment and she knows how to steal a crowd. Although her talk was not a typical R conference talk it was a perfect way to start of the conference. Later on, I exchanged a few words with Mara about how they work in RStudio.

Twitter @MadelijnBazen

– DBI: Recent developments in R’s database interface – Kirill Müller (@krlmlr) useful talk summarizing ways of connecting to various databases from R. Thing I wasn’t aware of: dbplyr. Looked pretty awesome.

– Getting more out of dplyr – Suzan Baert (@SuzanBaert) printed out and went through whole dplyr documentation. IMHO that itself sounds impressive. She recommended using less known but handy functions, such that: select_all, select_if, select_at.
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– Making shiny shine even brighter – definitely best talk of the day ???? ! The lecturer delivered invaluable knowledge and absolutely stole the show. ???? But seriously, in my private scale, it went 8/10 ???? I forgot to turn on a microphone at the beginning (some others did that as well) and maybe because of that, I became dry in mouth after several slides. But later on, it went smooth. I’m not very happy with Q&A as I got 3 questions in a row that I couldn’t answer specifically: When shiny.users?, Where I see the future: shiny, django or ruby? Are there plans to merge shiny.i18n with shiny?. It might have given the impression like I’m escaping from answers. Rest of the questions went fine. On the other hand, I believe that no-one received more of them and that means engagement.
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Twitter @cecilesauder

– An exploration of NSE and tidyval – Edwin Thoen (@edwin_thoen) Nice talk regarding problems with lazy evaluation, the same that Damian once mentioned. Edwin showed how to use substitute function to get rid of problems with tidyverse functions. Something like this:
f2 <- function(x,y) {a<-substitute(y); x+a}
It is similar to force:
f1 <- function(x,y) {force(y); x+3}
but it doesn’t evaluate the argument directly.
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– 50 ways to show your data – Thomas Hütter (@derfredo) – Thomas admitted that he comes from SQL community and he discovered R quite recently, so he was showing most of the well-known plotting packages. One I didn’t know: waterfalls.
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Lightning talks

Level varied from one to another but most were really interesting and well performed. A short summary of ones I liked the most:
– Two hobby projects with the text2vec package – Longhorn Lam (@longhowlam) – funny and very very simple projects with text2vec. Like analyzing ‘Bold and beautiful’ relation between characters based on plots descriptions.

– Using R/ R Markdown to create individual reports – Olga Sholderer (@sholderer)- nice way to generate good quality reports in word/excel with Markdown – IMHO big business value.

– Making multimillion-dollar baseball decisions with R, Shiny and H2O AutoML – Joe-fai Chow (@matlabulous) – a guy from H2O.ai. In my view: talk of the day. Have you watched Moneyball? So he got in touch with a real Moneyball guy (Billy Beane who was an inspiration for the movie & initially the book) and implemented – based on some public and private baseball data – simple players ranking. A real Moneyball guy used it once during some demo session in LA and two days later generated 20 mln $$$ transaction thanks to that. So impressive! I really think about going to H2O conference in London towards the end of October.
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Twitter @matlabulous

Miscellaneous
– Amsterdam is a really cool city. I’ve been there before, but back in my teenage years, I couldn’t appreciate it enough. ????
– One of the first Saturday’s was organized in Cardiff! ????
– I was wondering how many Appsilon hex stickers I gonna have to bring back home. Well, it appeared that none. Literally, ALL hex stickers were taken and people really liked them. (I even forgot to leave some for myself ???? ) ????
– Many people (circa 10) were asking about shiny.users! More news really soon, please sing up on our waiting list! ????
– … but they were asking about other packages too ????

Link to event: http://amsterdam2018.satrdays.org/

Cheers,
Dominik

Artykuł What you missed at satRday @Amsterdam pochodzi z serwisu Appsilon Data Science | We Provide End­ to­ End Data Science Solutions.