As I spent an exciting day at <a href="https://amsterdam2018.satrdays.org/">satRday</a> conference in Amsterdam I would like to share with you my thoughts. TL;DR: Event was cool, my presentation went fine ? <h2>General</h2> Wow, I don’t remember an event where I had so much fun. From most of the talks, I took out something valuable. People were really friendly &amp; open, I believe that I’ll keep in touch with many of them. R community always surprises me with how welcome they are. <h2>Talks</h2> - <a href="https://youtu.be/ot2urgT8Uxk"><strong>That’s not [data] science!</strong> </a>- Mara Averick (<a href="https://twitter.com/dataandme">@dataandme</a>) - I must admit that her talk was pure entertainment and she knows how to steal a crowd. Although her talk was not a typical R conference talk it was a perfect way to start of the conference. Later on, I exchanged a few words with Mara about how they work in <a href="https://www.rstudio.com/">RStudio</a>. <img class="wp-image-1277 size-medium" src="https://wordpress.appsilon.com/assets/uploads/2018/09/MadelijnBazen-600x465.jpg" alt="" width="600" height="465" /> Twitter @MadelijnBazen -<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGwpvS6nQKw"> <strong>DBI: Recent developments in R’s database interface</strong></a> - Kirill Müller (<a href="https://twitter.com/krlmlr">@krlmlr</a>) useful talk summarizing ways of connecting to various databases from R. Thing I wasn’t aware of: dbplyr. Looked pretty awesome. - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgJtufO_zMo"><strong>Getting more out of dplyr</strong></a> - Suzan Baert (<a href="https://twitter.com/suzanbaert">@SuzanBaert</a>) printed out and went through whole dplyr documentation. IMHO that itself sounds impressive. She recommended using less known but handy functions, such that: select_all, select_if, select_at. ?<a href="https://github.com/suzanbaert/SatRdaysAmsterdam18_dplyr">Slides</a> - <strong>Making shiny shine even brighte</strong>r - definitely best talk of the day :P ! The <a href="https://github.com/dokato">lecturer</a> delivered invaluable knowledge and absolutely stole the show. ;) But seriously, in my private scale, it went 8/10 :) I forgot to turn on a microphone at the beginning (some others did that as well) and maybe because of that, I became dry in mouth after several slides. But later on, it went smooth. I’m not very happy with Q&amp;A as I got 3 questions in a row that I couldn’t answer specifically: <a href="https://mailchi.mp/appsilon.com/shiny-user-management">When shiny.users?</a>, Where I see the future: shiny, django or ruby? Are there plans to merge <a href="https://appsilon.com/internationalization-of-shiny-apps-i18n/">shiny.i18n</a> with shiny?. It might have given the impression like I’m escaping from answers. Rest of the questions went fine. On the other hand, I believe that no-one received more of them and that means engagement. ?<a href="https://appsilon.com/assets/uploads/2018/09/AMST_-Making-Shiny-shine-even-brighter.pdf">Slides</a> <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WfxE73Q4e1g" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe> - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-AFdjYunO8"><strong>An exploration of NSE and tidyval</strong> </a>- Edwin Thoen (<a href="https://twitter.com/edwin_thoen">@edwin_thoen</a>) Nice talk regarding problems with lazy evaluation, the same that <a href="https://appsilon.com/how-environments-work-in-r-and-what-is-lazy-evaluation/">Damian once mentioned</a>. Edwin showed how to use substitute function to get rid of problems with tidyverse functions. Something like this: f2 &lt;- function(x,y) {a&lt;-substitute(y); x+a} It is similar to force: f1 &lt;- function(x,y) {force(y); x+3} but it doesn’t evaluate the argument directly. ?<a href="https://github.com/EdwinTh/satRday">Slides</a>, <a href="https://edwinth.github.io/blog/nse/">full article</a>. - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dbBktmveG0"><strong>50 ways to show your data</strong></a> - Thomas Hütter (<a href="https://twitter.com/derfredo">@derfredo</a>) - Thomas admitted that he comes from SQL community and he discovered R quite recently, so he was showing most of the well-known plotting packages. One I didn't know: waterfalls. ?<a href="https://github.com/SQLThomas/Conferences/tree/master/SatRdayAms2018">Slides</a> &nbsp; <h2>Lightning talks</h2> Level varied from one to another but most were really interesting and well performed. A short summary of ones I liked the most: - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqTBV6SJijE"><strong>Two hobby projects with the text2vec package</strong></a> - Longhorn Lam (<a href="https://twitter.com/longhowlam">@longhowlam</a>) - funny and very very simple projects with text2vec. Like analyzing ‘Bold and beautiful’ relation between characters based on plots descriptions. - <strong>Using R/ R Markdown to create individual reports</strong> - Olga Sholderer (<a href="https://twitter.com/sholderer">@sholderer</a>)- nice way to generate good quality reports in word/excel with Markdown - IMHO big business value. - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZHPhVMtCIc"><strong>Making multimillion-dollar baseball decisions with R, Shiny and H2O AutoML</strong></a> - Joe-fai Chow (<a href="https://twitter.com/matlabulous">@matlabulous</a>) - a guy from <a href="http://H2O.ai">H2O.ai</a>. In my view: talk of the day. Have you watched Moneyball? So he got in touch with a real Moneyball guy (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Beane">Billy Beane</a> who was an inspiration for the movie &amp; initially the book) and implemented - based on some public and private baseball data - simple players ranking. A real Moneyball guy used it once during some demo session in LA and two days later generated 20 mln $$$ transaction thanks to that. So impressive! I really think about going to H2O conference in London towards the end of October. ?<a href="https://github.com/woobe/satRdayAMS_moneyball">Slides</a> <img class="size-medium wp-image-1279" src="https://wordpress.appsilon.com/assets/uploads/2018/09/matlabulous-600x400.jpg" alt="" width="600" height="400" /> Twitter @matlabulous Miscellaneous - Amsterdam is a really cool city. I’ve been there before, but back in my teenage years, I couldn’t appreciate it enough. ? - One of the first Saturday's was organized in Cardiff! ? - I was wondering how many Appsilon hex stickers I gonna have to bring back home. Well, it appeared that none. Literally, ALL hex stickers were taken and people really liked them. (I even forgot to leave some for myself :( ) ? - Many people (circa 10) were asking about shiny.users! More news really soon, please sing up on our <a href="https://mailchi.mp/appsilon.com/shiny-user-management">waiting list!</a> ? - … but they were asking about other packages too ? Link to event: <a href="http://amsterdam2018.satrdays.org/">http://amsterdam2018.satrdays.org/</a> Cheers, Dominik