In one of the most coldest weeks in the history of Chicago, the first meeting of the year for R Ladies Chicago took place at We Work.

Before starting with all the material, I would like to say that it is a super fun, happy group and you can feel the good vibes in the air, I had fun, I learned a lot and spent a good time. Surely I will continue participating in other meetings and encourage you to participate in.

These were the presentations about some of the most remarkable points from R Studio Conference in Austin.

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Lightning Talk Topics

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Deep Learning – Caroline Williams

Caroline started with an introduction about Deep Learning presented which are the types of Neural networks, how a model architecture works, what the Keras package is and finally inviting us to Deep Learning Study group.

About the references, “Deep Learning with R in Motion” is a 3 hours course, with a full duration of 8 hours is you want to go thought all the examples. The first part of the course shows the detailed material item by item, and it is a good idea to check if it is a good fit for you previous to purchased it.

Takeaways

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File Structure & File System Operation – Amy Yang

Amy attended to the workshop “What They Forgot to Teach You About R” dictated by Jenny Bryan. And she shared one of the lessons: “How to practice safe paths”.

First at all, because something is common is not always a good idea, and that applies to the extended use of setwd() at the beginning of (almost) any project. If you are not aware about what is setwd(), in a nutshell is a way to set up the file path for your project, however that gonna works for (and just for) your project, and if you try to share your code with others, the chance that something like that works is almost zero.

So, what is the recommendation? Use the package here(). Why? here() will always point to your project directory even if you setwd() points to a different directory

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Takeaways (Are you prepared?)

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Shiny – Natalie Jorion

Natalie Jorion explained in a very simple and straight way 10 tips to improve your Shiny apps.

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Reproducible Research – Katherine Simeon

Katherine Simeon shared some tips about how to introduce new packages in her reproducible research including: usethis, rrtools, containerit, and “Knit with Parameters” in R Markdown.

Also, during this presentation Katherine shared a long list of useful material used as inspiration for this talk:

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Takeaways

An overview about the next libraries: usethis, rrtools and containerit and how to knit with parameters.

Useful and reliable material to use in your own researches

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Tidyverse Developer Day & Contributing to open source – Angela Li

A cheerful Angela Li presented her experience about how to contribute to open source during the Austin Conference. She worked with other assistants using pair programming to solve an issue and also she received feedback from Hadley Wickham and Jenny Bryan.

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Takeaways

It is easy to contribute to the open source

It a good way to try new practices like working with pair programming (one of the most well-known practice from XP programming, truly educative and also productive)

It is an amazing way to interact with other people for example and even receive feedback from Wickham and Jenny Bryan.

Straight explanation about how to collaborate with other projects.

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Final words

A huge thank you for the R Ladies Chicago team and their generous presentations about so many relevant topics.