Two weeks ago I flew from New York to Warsaw, Poland to begin a new role at Appsilon Data Science. On Saturday, I’ll be flying right back in the other direction to attend rstudio::conf::2020. This is convenient because my bags aren’t even unpacked yet, and also exciting because rstudio::conf is an all-star weekend for the R community.

If you are planning to attend the conference, please drop by the Appsilon Data Science booth in the Yosemite room and say hello to me and a few other members of the Appsilon team! You can also find us at the Bay Area useR Group meetup at 6:30pm on January 27 at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square. We attend and sponsor a lot of R events in Europe so we’re excited to check in with the community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Conference tickets are not required for the meetup, so you have no excuse not to join us.

And if you want to book a free session with one of our experts to discuss your R/Shiny or data science project, you can do so here.

It would also be a good idea to find some time to attend my colleagues’ presentations. One of our founders, Damian Rodziewicz, is giving a presentation entitled “Building a native iPad dashboard using plumber and RStudio Connect in Pharma” on Jan. 29th at 4:23pm in Room 4. Damian will also present an e-poster: “What does it take to make a Shiny prototype ready for production?”

One of our talented developers, Pedro Silva will present an e-poster “From Front-End to Shiny development. Augmenting the power of your dashboards with modern front-end tools.” E-posters will be shown during the opening reception on Tuesday (Jan. 28) from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.

I’ve asked my colleagues what presentations they’re looking forward to most at rstudio::conf. Here’s what they said:

PAWEL

I am interested in stopping by Reproducible Shiny apps with shinymeta with Carson Sievert. shinymeta was developed fairly recently and offers insights into the shiny development workflow. I would like to learn about its various features.

DAMIAN

I’m pretty excited to attend the Modern Geospatial Data Analysis with R Workshop with Zev Ross. Here is the description: “An explosion of packages for working with spatial data means you can ditch your GIS software and do geospatial analysis in R end-to-end.” I am very interested in analyzing satellite images, so I am looking forward to this presentation.

PEDRO

I might try to catch the Javascript for Shiny Users Workshop. I’m an avid Javascript user and I believe that there is a real place for js in Shiny apps. Some people believe that Javascript should be eliminated completely, but they are wrong. As long as there is an internet, there will be Javascript.

I asked my other colleagues who will be staying in Poland: If you could attend the conference, which presentations would you be most excited about?

MARIA

I would attend Introduction to Data Science in the Tidyverse Workshop with Amelia McNamara and Hadley Wickham. I just started my journey with R and I believe it would be very valuable for me.

KRZYSIEK

I think I would go with “Deep Learning with Keras and TensorFlow in R Workflow” with Brad Boehmke because I know a bit of the theory of Deep Learning, but what I really need is to gain some practice. Confidence in doing, as they say. As a company we have been doing some interesting things with Deep Learning as of late, so I’m looking forward to joining the fun.

TOMASZ

This one looks fun: Learning R with humorous side projects with Ryan Timpe, who actually has a really cool-sounding job — Senior Data Scientist at @LEGO_Group. I would also love to see this one in person: Practical Plumber Patterns with James Blair.  Plumber appears to be on the rise, I’d love to see the production-grade setting with this framework. And, last but not least: Updates on Spark, MLflow, and the broader ML ecosystem with Javier Laraschi looks very interesting – Python is definitely having a head start here, I would love to get to know what’s the state of affairs in R world.

ADAM

Here are my picks:

Creating custom vector classes with the vctrs package with Jesse Sadler: It’s a new implementation that allows you to paint custom vectors. I’d be curious to hear about the updates to the package.

Asynchronous programming in R with Winston Chang: It’ll be very powerful when we’re talking about its application to Shiny and Plumber. Winston Chang does great work.

R: Then and Now with Jared Lander: it would be really good to go back and see how R looked 10 years ago, and how it’s developed over time.

MARCIN

Kryzysiek and Marcin at WhyR? Warsaw 2019

Modern Geospatial Data Analysis with R Workshop: Like Damian, I am particularly interested in maps and putting data on them. This is something I learned at university and I would like to hear about the recent developments in this area.

What They Forgot to Teach You about R Workshop with Jenny Bryan, Jim Hester, and Kara Woo: I am expecting to learn something extraordinary, something I wouldn’t have discovered myself! That’s an impressive line-up of speakers.

Deploying End-To-End Data Science with Shiny, Plumber, and Pins: Pins was recently introduced by RStudio and I would like to learn more about it!

KRYSTIAN

I’d be happy to attend Deploying End-To-End Data Science with Shiny, Plumber, and Pins by Alex Gold. My daily work is strongly related to the topic so I’d be happy to learn how to improve my approach and make use of tips I could hear during the workshop. I’d also like to get inspiration on different approaches for scaling R solutions so for sure Practical Plumber Patterns by James Blair and Asynchronous programming in R by Winston Chang would be a good choice.

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Article rstudio::conf 2020 –> conference preview comes from Appsilon Data Science | End­ to­ End Data Science Solutions.