Hi everyone,

As it turns out, we will have a meeting in August after all! So I hope you’re back from holiday, because Curtis Kephart from RStudio is visiting Scotland around that time, and has offered to come give a talk. Until recently, Curtis was an academic economist, but at the moment he is working as Community Organizer at RStudio - which he will be able to share more about himself!

Specifically, the upcoming meeting will be held on Wednesday 15th of August, at 4.00pm (notice the slightly earlier start due to university timetabling issues). The venue is the Psychology Building in 7 George Square, room F.21. As usual, the meeting is open for all to attend, and newcomers / beginners are very welcome! If you want to join us, can you please let me know in this Google Form, as I’d like to get an idea of numbers.
[FYI, all data is anonymous unless you provide contact details yourself as comments, and you will not need to log in to a Google account either].

So, Curtis will be discussing some cool features added recently for:

R Markdown in production (slides here)

R Markdown is a simple tool to mix your code (R, Python, Bash, etc.), results, and prose in a single document. In this talk we review a few extensions of this tool to make your data science workflow more efficient and your output more useful.

• Deploy to html, pdf, word, ppt, blogdown, bookdown and much more.
• R Markdown Notebooks - Interact with and develop your document as you develop it.
• HTMLWidgets - Embedding interactive JavaScript visualizations in your R Markdown doc is easy.
• Parameterized markdown documents - specify parameters to customize and further automate your analysis.
• FlexDashboards - Embedding interactivity (Shiny Apps) in R Markdown documents.

Should time allow it, Curtis can also give a quick demo of:

RStudio Connect

RStudio Connect is a commercial product by RStudio. It allows for the deployment of data science artifacts super easy:

• Push-button deployment of all sorts of R Markdown docs, shiny apps, and plumber APIs.
• Secure who has access to those reports.
• Automate updating and distribution of those reports.

I do hope you’ll join us, in which case here’s a map of where we’ll be:

See you there!

Caterina