The R community and the package ecosystem are awesome but it can be difficult to sustain your R packages when you only have so much free time. To make a stellar package you’ve got to keep on top of the issues, make great documentation, have that all important hex sticker, and generally have good quality…
We at Locke Data maintain a few R packages that we’ve submitted to CRAN to help increase their userbase. After running devtools::release(), clicking in a confirmation email… what remains is waiting. Inspired by our experience, we’ve created a dashboard to help other package maintainers follow their package’s journey to CRANterbury. Read more about its making…
Sometimes packages have functions that don’t do the things the way you want them to do them and you have to either re-build the function, or work with it as-is and add code around it to solve your issue. I’ve had to do this recently with the googleway package and it’s google_distance() function so I…
As a heavy R and Tidyverse user, I’ve been playing with Microsofts m/Power Query language included in Excel and PowerBI from that perspective, looking for the functions to make my life easier, developing small code pipelines for my processing and trying to get a smooth, clear and maintainable data manipulation process in place. The Problem…
People use R for lots of reasons: “It’s great for the models I need”, “I like the functional approach”, “It’s the tool I’m most comfortable with”. People don’t use R for these reasons: “I have a favourite processor core, I don’t want to use the others”, “I love how my memory needs to fit all…
How awesome is open source software? Quite awesome in our opinion! Locke Data maintains several open source repos on GitHub, in particular of R packages, and we’d like you to join in the fun! This month, we’re taking part in Hacktoberfest and will do our best to mentor you through your first open source contributions…
We’re done with the basics of handling data in R. Now we want to know how to make sense of it. We know what kind of data it is, we know how to look at column names, dimensions and the like. If you’re trying to add value to this data however, that very often isn’t…
Cosmos DB is a snazzy new(ish) Microsoft Azure product. I was able to go to Microsoft Office in London for three days of training on the database service, which was really well structured and well run, with a lot of knowledgeable Microsoft bods around to pass on their considerable knowledge. This post will extract out…
R objects To quickly recap, so far we’ve just worked with some single values to get to grips with how some of the various operations work. Of course, we rarely work with a single value! If we did, we could just use a calculator. This instalment you’ll get to grips with some different ways of…
It’s time for a Twitter book draw again: every month, a random Locke Data Twitter follower wins an excellent data science book! This month’s book was Weapons of Math Destruction : How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. The animation I chose to create was inspired by the idea of destruction and by my…