Learning R and Building Community

Mark your calendars! This month we will hear from 2 people about their pathways to learning R and the great community-building that happened along the way. Redfin has kindly offered to host us in their space in downtown Seattle and will be providing pizza.

Speakers:

• Stefanie Butland, Community Manager at rOpenSci
• Malisa Smith, Bioinformatician at University of Washington

Stefanie Butland:
I am the Community Manager for an organization of R practitioners...but I am not an R practitioner. For the first 1.5 years in my job, this was a feature, but lately it has felt more like a bug. In this talk I will introduce rOpenSci, our packages, and our system for transparent software peer review, and then share my story of starting to learn R by (not so) passive absorption of information and best practices from R-Ladies, rOpenSci, and the broader R world.

Malisa Smith:
Flow cytometry is commonly used by biologists to measure the abundance of specific molecules in millions of cells, while retaining information at the single-cell level. The resulting high-dimensional, high-throughput datasets have led to the development of unique software for analyzing flow cytometry data. I will talk about how I learned to use open source R packages for analyzing flow data, and I hope that my experience will help other people navigate the landscape of flow cytometry analysis tools and online software resources in general.