posit::conf(2024) Watch Party

2024 Posit Conference Watch Party with R-Ladies Ottawa

Posit, the company that makes many of the tools you know and love (RStudio, Shiny, the tidyverse, and many more!) hosts an annual conference. This year, the conference took place in Seattle from August 12th-14th. Did you miss the conference, but still want to know what’s new in the world of data science? Look no further – R-Ladies Ottawa is hosting a posit::conf(2024) Watch Party!

This event will take place on October 23rd, from 5:30-7:30pm, at the Ottawa Public Library (Sunnyside branch - Program room 1B). Attendance is FREE and there will be door prizes available to win (see details below)! We’ll watch a few of the most popular talks from this year’s conference and have opportunities to discuss and network. Afterwards, we’ll be heading to a restaurant in the Glebe for anyone who would like to join!

Please note that the mission of R-Ladies is to increase gender diversity in the R community. While our Meetup Group is open to anyone to join, our events are intended to provide a safe space for women and gender minorities. Male allies may attend our in-person events if they are invited by and accompanied by a woman or gender minority.

Door prize giveaway

By attending this event, you’ll have a chance to win a copy of David Keyes’ new book, R for the Rest of Us: A Statistics-Free Introduction, courtesy of NoStarch Press.

Description of the book: “Learn how to use R for everything from workload automation and creating online reports, to interpreting data, map making, and more.

Written by the founder of a very popular online training platform for the R programming language!

The R programming language is a remarkably powerful tool for data analysis and visualization, but its steep learning curve can be intimidating for some. If you just want to automate repetitive tasks or visualize your data, without the need for complex math, R for the Rest of Us is for you.”

Free stickers!

Posit has generously donated hex stickers for this event! Everyone who attends will be able to take some home.

Event schedule

5:30pm - 7:00pm - Watch party and discussion (see talk descriptions below!)
7:00pm - Networking and announcement of door prize winner
7:30pm - We’ll be heading to a restaurant in the Glebe, for anyone who would like to join!

The talks we’ll watch:

1. Introducing Positron (Julia Silge) and Exploratory Data Analysis in Python with Positron (Isabelle Zimmerman)

Positron is a next generation data science IDE that is newly available to the community for early beta testing. This new IDE is an extensible tool built to facilitate exploratory data analysis, reproducible authoring, and publishing data artifacts. Positron currently supports these data workflows in either or both Python and/or R, and is designed with a forward-looking architecture that can support other data science languages in the future. In this session, learn from the team building Positron about how and why it is designed the way it is, what will feel familiar or new coming from other IDEs, and whether it might be a good fit for your own work.

2. Closeread: bringing Scrollytelling to Quarto - Andrew Bray

Scrollytelling is a style of web design that transitions graphics and text as a user scrolls, allowing stories to progress naturally. Despite its power, scrollytelling typically requires specialist web dev skills beyond the reach of many data scientists. Closeread is a Quarto extension that makes a wide range of scrollytelling techniques available to authors without traditional web dev experience, with support for cross-fading plots, graphics and other chunk output alongside narrative content. You can zoom in on poems, prose and images, as well as highlighting important phrases of text. Finally, Closeread allows authors with experience in Observable JS to write their own animated graphics that update smoothly as scrolling progresses.

3. GitHub: How To Tell Your Professional Story - Abigail Haddad

GitHub is more than just a version control tool, it's a way of explaining your professional identity to prospective employers and collaborators – and you can build your profile now, before you're looking for new opportunities. This talk is about how to think of GitHub as an opportunity, not a chore, and how to represent yourself well without making developing your GitHub profile into a part-time job. I'll talk about why GitHub adds value beyond a personal website, what kinds of projects are helpful to share, and some good development practices to get in the habit of, regardless of your project specifics.