Drew Lanenga - Using the Best Tool for the Job

Often as R enthusiasts, we like to use R wherever possible. Some things, like reading large data files in non-standard formats or iterative algorithms like MCMC, are difficult to overcome in R, even after jumping through all the hoops -- refactoring, vectorization, bytecode compilation, etc.

Go (https://golang.org/) can help reduce the pain on a lot of these problems. Go is a statically typed language with garbage collection, type safety, concurrency primitives and flexible interfaces. It has a great community, with a lot of great projects (Docker, etcd, Kubernetes, Vitess, etc.) and linear algebra support. If nothing else, it's more fun than C/C++ and especially more fun than Java.

We'll talk about how we try to balance the best of both languages at Lytics. We'll walk through a changepoint detection package we recently made and open sourced, prototyped and validated in R, then ported to Go to fit in nicely with the rest of our stack.

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Drew Lanenga is a Data Scientist at Lytics (http://www.getlytics.com/), a Portland based company. You can find Drew on Twitter at @DrewLanenga (https://twitter.com/DrewLanenga)

We will have pizza. Doors open at 6:00 pm - talk starts 6:30 pm

We'll go to a local watering hole (to be decided) after the talk.

Hashtag for R meetups: #pdxrlang (https://twitter.com/hashtag/pdxrlang?src=hash)