What an experience! rstudio::conf(2022) + more

I just got back from the RStudio Conference!! Ahhhhh!!! I am still super jazzed by this week, so this post may or may not be as coherent as past posts. I want to share some highlights from this week and reflect on my R journey from the first RStudio conference in 2020 (just before the pandemic hit the US) to now.

So…what happened this week at RStudio::Conf(2022)?!

All of the things! So many great moments! I can take you through the highlights of my days.

First, I could only afford to attend the conference because RStudio offered the diversity scholarship. Without the scholarship, I wouldn’t have gotten this experience, so I am incredibly grateful for that. Shout out to the organizers for making these conference dreams come true. Because of the scholarship, I go to choose a workshop to attend for the first couple of days. I took the “What They Forgot to Teach You About R” workshop led by Shannon McClintock Pileggi, Jenny Bryan, and E. David Aja.

Day 1 of the workshop

The power of the here and usethis packages

I have heard of these packages (or at least seen the stickers), but I didn’t know how I should incorporate them into my workflow (if at all). I have been using R projects for a while but wasn’t using them to their full extent because, in my workplace, data lived in other places at the time. We needed to store our files in a specific way, so I always used direct paths and, of course, would run into issues sharing scripts with teammates or breaking my code when I reorganized folders and forgot to change it. But with the here package, no matter where the project is saved, I can direct the path to the folder and file of interest within the project directory, and it will work. Magic! And I don’t even know where to begin with the usethis package. I have to explore it some more, but in the workshop we used it to create personal access tokens in Git and repositories that pre-selected things you would usually do anyways.

Project-oriented workflow organization

We also got some other great tips regarding project-oriented workflows such as file naming conventions and creating quick reporting, like compiling an HTML document from an R script (I didn’t know what was possible). Additionally, we got an intro to working in Git and GitHub. This year I started using my account when I was doing my project in the fellowship or making this website. It is refreshing to know that an expert like Jenny Bryan struggles with Git sometimes and can dislike it as much as the rest of us. But I did not know of Git tools like GitKraken or doing Git pull from rebase as a tactic to avoid conflicts. Also, I finally understand what the .gitignore file is supposed to do (I really had no clue 🤣).

Day 2 of the workshop

Personal administration

We focused on the personal setup of your RStudio on your computer. I am not sure why I found it so surprising that you could tailor your setup, but I was fully amazed. I was especially amazed by the .Renviorn and .Rprofile. Using the .Renviorn as a place to put sensitive objects in your environment and ensure you don’t share them elsewhere when sharing your code in Github (at least when you add it to the .gitignore file). I needed a minute to wrap my head around that 🤯.

Another big wow moment for me was learning about the renv package. The ability to take a snapshot of your RStudio setup and package versions for your project to ensure everything will run as needed no matter where you share it is incredible. I ran into many issues this package could have solved if I had only known. But I know now.

Full conference days

The conference days were an explosion of great people, incredible lighting talks, and exciting keynotes. Some of the major announcements included:

• RStudio, PBC will be changing their name to Posit, PBC 🤩
• There is a Shiny for Python in the making 😄
• There is also a visual editor for Shiny in the making 😁
• All the details on Quarto is out 🥳

There were so many great talks, so I am not going to get into all of them, but here are some of the ones I especially enjoyed:

• Meghan Harris on Making Data Pipelines in R: A Story from a Self Taught Perspective
• Rachael Dempsey on Everything I learned about community building, I learned from growing up in a restaurant
• Jacqueline Nolis on I made an entire e-commerce platform on Shiny
• Ilena Fenwick on A Journey to Data Science: Tools for Equity and Diversity in STEM

So…what am I feeling after all of this?!

I mean…literally all of the feelings.

Back in January 2020…

I got to learn R during my time at the City University of New York. All I understood about it then was what I needed to use to do my job well. So I could data wrangle and clean with the best of them, but that was it. And even then, it was limited because of security protocols and the inability to update packages to work with our data pipelines on projects. I had no previous exposure to any coding experience and didn’t know the terminology of something being open-source vs. proprietary. I didn’t even know there was a community of people making packages and other tools for folks to use.

A couple of colleagues coached me to apply to go to the conference. I went ahead and applied, not expecting much of it. I was super surprised and excited to get the scholarship to attend the conference. This would be my first trip (and only so far) to the west coast, and one of the best work trips ever. I went surfing with some colleagues/great friends (or at least I tried to balance – I just learned how to swim :sweat-smile:), took workshops together, and hung out after sessions to chat about what we were learning. I went to all sessions I could, and looked in on the Latin, Public Sector, and RLadies birds of a feather meet-ups. I distinctly remember feeling emotional having dinner with people speaking in Spanish with one another about their work and watching the lighting talk in my parent’s native language. It felt like home in a new way I didn’t realize I needed. 🥲

And then, I was absolutely enthusiastic to see Allison Horst’s talk and her work of bringing art and illustration to her teaching in R courses. She was doing what I wanted to do for myself and see in education. As a visual learner, images help me learn, and seeing her work brought me so much delight. It was the point in time at the conference where I felt the most welcomed to be there. 🥰

That conference helped fill in the basics of an open-source community. I felt like I walked into a whole new world and was trying to figure out how to be a more significant part of it, but glad I was there.

(Then 2020 into 2021 happened, and we don’t need to get into that 👀)

Current day July 2022…

The version of me that attended this conference would be almost unrecognizable compared to me today. Besides my social skills – I was a bit rusty, so many people and socializing all at once – I felt in my element. 😎 I felt a bit more confident in my skill set, learned a bit of Python, have a website using R, and have attended many more online community events. I even wore the brightest outfits and patterns in my wardrobe.

I wasn’t sure if I could attend the conference again because at the time to apply, I was just finishing out my Data Science For All fellowship and in the throws of job hunting. I wouldn’t have been able to afford the conference if I didn’t have the scholarship, so getting that acceptance email, I squealed, cried, and then got to planning my whole time there.

I had more direction on what I wanted to get out of my experience at the conference. I knew there were better ways to manage projects and work in R or RStudio, so I attended the workshops and sessions that I felt would fill those gaps. The workshop was everything I could have imagined. Whereas before, much of the terminology would go over my head, but I could really keep up this time. I think I was most proud of myself for that. Seeing some of my old colleagues and catching up felt great. Meeting new diversity scholars, seeing some Twitter connections, and RStudio Data Science Hangout connections all in real life was absolutely everything I wanted. Such a rejuvenating time!

So…what will I do for next year?!

Well, I will do whatever I can to be there next year. It will be the first Posit Conference! Attending the conference is like stepping into my utopia of data science goodness in R and global community connection. I don’t know if it is because I am still on the conference energy, but I have some big goals I want to see through that I will throw out there for the community to keep me accountable:

1. Incorporate R at work - When I feel settled at work in my new job in a brand new industry, I want to share the resources and processes I learned at the conference. I think there are many cool things I can do with R that will be impactful and an excellent addition to work, but it would be even better if I could get the team to follow me on this R train. Good thing they are super supportive and open to anything!

2. Host an online event (or curate something to share) – I want to create something tangible to give to the community. I am thinking of something really basic, nothing too fancy. It could be approachable for someone like myself who needs just a bit of guidance on new concepts.

3. Speak at next year’s conference - I (sorta kinda perhaps maybe) want to have a lightning talk at the conference next year. 😳 I have no idea what it will be about, but I want to do it. We’ll see how that plays out. You all are welcome to ask me how that is going throughout the year. At me in tweets and LinkedIn DMs will be great motivators.

But all-in-all, I am proud of myself and my growth in the field. I’ll do my best to continue keeping up with the incredible R peeps.