In the interests of making this community home for those of us who are reddit refugees, let’s go ahead and introduce ourselves.

Some suggested things to comment on/include in your introduction:

  • Tidyverse, base, or data.table?
  • Are you primarily a user, a developer, or in between?
  • How long have you been using R?
  • What other languages do you use?
  • What do you use R for? Statistics? generative art? data wrangling?
  • Are you using R primarily for work, fun, hobbies, or something else?
  • Are you a hex sticker collector? Why or why not?
  • Where are you on the data engineering <----> pure statistics continuum?
  • What’s your favorite obscure package?
  • @[email protected]OPMEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    I’m @a_statistician! I’m a statistics professor at a midwestern state university. I teach R and python programming and research data visualization.

    • Tidyverse. I’ve always wanted to get into data.table, but I find that tidy verbs are easier to teach and explain to my students, and it’s more important to me that the code is readable than that it is a bit faster in production, since I spend most of my time trying to understand WTF students’ code is doing.

    • I’m primarily a user, though I have contributed to several packages and I enjoy development - I just don’t spend as much time on it as I do in R generally.

    • I’ve been using R since 2009, give or take, so almost 15 years now.

    • I also teach Python, though it’s definitely not my default language anymore. I can accomplish minor tasks in JavaScript or C++ given enough time and googling, but R is the primary language I’m fluent in and using day to day. I have a profound hatred of Java that stems back to the trauma of taking AP Comp Sci I in C++ and then AP Comp Sci II in Java, with no transition to teach the basics of Java.

    • I use R for data visualization and data wrangling, though I wish I had enough time to play with generative art, because it seems really cool.

    • I use R for work, fun, and hobbies, but fun and hobbies are usually work related because professor life is all-consuming.

    • I am a total hex sticker whore. I still mourn laptop upgrades where I can’t transfer the hex stickers from laptop to laptop, but I am trying a new trick with my latest laptop: I put contact paper down first, so that I can pull all the stickers off at once and frame them after the laptop is retired.

    • While my Ph.D. is in statistics, I would consider myself more on the data science side of things (e.g. right in the middle of the continuum) - I do a lot of data wrangling and visualization, and tend to not fit models unless I absolutely have to.

    • I think evil.R might be the worst thing I’ve ever seen. As far as actually useful packages, I’ve contributed to ggpcp, which is a very neat package that allows you to make parallel coordinate plots with a mixture of categorical and continuous variables using tidy syntax - the nice part of the way it works is that you can usually track an entire observation through a series of variables because it breaks ties on the categorical axis.