Ready 4 R 2024-8-26: Some PositConf Highlights
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Hello all,
Two weeks ago I went up to Seattle for work and for PositConf. It was a great two days, had dinner and coffee with lots of people, met some new people, and got to catch up with a lot of Data Science Friends.
Unfortunately, I also got COVID, and have been waylaid since then. My one PSA: when you start to get symptoms, get the antivirals (like Paxlovid) as soon as you can.
I thought I’d write a little bit about a few sessions at PositConf that I really enjoyed.
quarto-live Extension for Teaching
As part of the first keynote, George Stagg (of WebR fame) showed a new quarto extension that integrates WebR into teaching tutorials. If you don’t know what WebR is, it’s a special version of R that can run in your browser. With the {quarto-live} extension, he showed that you can
build formal tutorials with answers, hints, and feedback. He also showed integration of packages such as {gradethis}, which gives you the ability to give more feedback on exercises.
Check it out here: <https://github.com/r-wasm/quarto-live>.
Positron: The new Posit IDE
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention there were a ton of talks about Positron, the new Data Science focused IDE from Posit built on Visual Studio Code. It adds a lot of the great RStudio features to languages as Python, such as the ability to view objects, explore data, and get help
quickly. It helps you manage multiple versions/environments of Python and R, with easy switching between them.
Should you switch? If you are R focused, you should probably stay with RStudio. However, if your group is multi-lingual, you may want to start considering it. Currently it supports R and Python, but is extensible to other languages. There are some really nifty improvements, such as the
Data Explorer with a new summary panel of your data.
Check out an early version of Positron here:
<https://github.com/posit-dev/positron>
datapage: A Web Page for Your Data
One of the nifty lightning talks was about datapage, which is a template for your dataset package. It provides a nifty frontend for your dataset (stored in Redivis), including exploration options with Observable Plot, viewing the actual tables in your package, a tailored API for accessing the data, and a nice description page. A really nifty way to share your data online!
Check a demo here: <https://datapages.github.io/datapage/> and the template is here: <https://github.com/datapages/datapage>
More to Come
That’s all I’ll write about this time around. More to come, when I feel better. Thanks all for reading.