useR!2019 roundup: workflow, reproducibility and friends!

Better science

In the grand theme of making better science, I would include talks touching on improving reproducibility, bridging the skills gap or encouraging good practices.

• Julia Stewart Lowndes’s awesome keynote on using R to fill the rift between environmental data and data science (R for better science in less time).
• Joe Cheng’s keynote on solving the reproducibility problem of Shiny apps. His commitment to give a talk on this topic was the catalyst for the development of {shinymeta} – an R package that captures Shiny logic and exposes it as R code (Shiny’s Holy Grail: Interactivity with reproducibility).
• Julie Josse’s keynote on missing data and modelling in R. She is also one of the maintainers of the CRAN Task View on missing data (A missing value tour in R).
• I will put Davis Vaughan’s tutorial on {hardhat} in this bucket too. {hardhat} is a developer focused package aimed at standardising modelling packages to follow best-practices (Design For Humans! A Toolkit For Creating Intuitive Modeling Packages).
• Our own Hannah Frick took attendees on a lightning tour of {goodpractice} – a chatty package that analyses your code and gives you advice on best practices when building R packages (goodpractice – A Tool for Good Package Development). Hannah’s topic touches on both workflow and better scientific practice making it a good bridge between what I consider the two main themes of the conference.

Better workflow

Under workflow I grouped tools aimed at making your life easier (mostly by reducing cognitive load), be it when building and deploying Shiny apps, reshaping your data or building R packages. Talks that stood out for me under this umbrella were:

• Vincent Guyader’s talk on {golem} – a package developed by the crew at ThinkR, aimed at abstracting away some of the complexities of developing a production-ready Shiny apps (Golem : A Framework for Building Robust & Production Ready Shiny Apps).
• Jenny Bryan’s talk on {usethis} and its conscious uncoupling from {devtools}. {usethis} implements the DRY – don’t repeat yourself – concept and aims to facilitate of key steps of the package development workflow (DRY out your workflow with the usethis package). Hint: we love {usethis} and we’re going to make heavy use of it during our own EARL package building workshop.
• Hadley Wickham’s talk on Enhancements to data tidying. Following feedback from users on finding {tidyr} gather() and spread()sometimes confusing, two new, more intuitive, functions were introduced called pivot_longer() and pivot_wider(). More info in the new vignette.
• Romain François’s talks on new {dplyr} functionality (n() cool #dplyr things) and the {dance} experimental package looking to implement {dplyr}-like functionality, but supported by the latest low-level developments in R, such as the {rlang} and {vctrs} packages.

I spent most of the rest of my time in the programming and performance tracks where, in addition to those named above, there were some other remarkable talks:

• Colin Gillespie’s – which probably was the funniest talk of the conference (R and security). He highlighted a few instances in which access to a users system can be gained via relatively inconspicuous R tasks.
• Jim Hester’s talk on {vroom} – “the fastest delimited reader for R” – a new file import package that uses the altrep framework introduced in R 3.5 (Real-time file import with the vroom package).
• Gábor Csárdi spoke about {pak} which proposes a new way to install packages – an alternative to install.packages() – that’s fast, safe and convenient (pak: a fresh approach to package installation).
• Lionel Henry talked about writing {tidyverse}-like functions that make use of non-standard evaluation (Reusing tidyverse code, the easy way).

For those who missed out, the keynotes are available on the RConsortium YouTube channel. Slides for the presentations can be found alongside the programme – https://user2019.r-project.org/talk_schedule/. Suthira Owlarn has collated more conference materials here – https://github.com/sowla/useR2019-materials.

So I wish you interesting R adventures and I hope to see you soon at LondonR, EARL or on Twitter!