The People of Posit: Bringing Personality to R Packages - posit::conf(2023)

Transcript#

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.

Hey y'all, I'm JP. And I'm Sarah. And we are PhD students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

As you can imagine, in North Carolina, there's a lot of different farmer's market. The Carrboro farmer's market is two minutes away from where I live. Now I go here every Saturday, and what I've learned is the food just tastes so much better when you get to know the farmer.

JP recently took me to my first farmer's market, and there it was a lot of fun, but it was really overwhelming at first. Because there was so much going on, I didn't know who to talk to, or what to say, or even where to start.

And this reminded me a lot of when I started coding in R. I was faced with this beautiful wall of hex codes, but I wasn't sure how they worked, or where to start, or what to do once I loaded a package. It wasn't until recently that I realized behind each of these packages is a person that really wants you to succeed in using that package, even though it can be a little bit intimidating still to reach out to these people and know what to say.

It wasn't until recently that I realized behind each of these packages is a person that really wants you to succeed in using that package, even though it can be a little bit intimidating still to reach out to these people and know what to say.

The podcast and reaching out to R celebrities

So I've had some success doing this on my podcast, From Where Does It Stem?, where I interview scientists from all over the world and ask them how they got there. I've interviewed people like Jane Goodall, the director of the NIH, Francis Collins, Tony Fauci's boss, and our boy, Hadley Wickham . I asked them questions about their upbringings, how they got to where they are, what their favorite songs are, and also how they think STEM or science can be more inclusive.

So for this year's Posit Conference, we decided to ask some local R slash bioconductor celebrities some questions. We did video interviews with two of them to give you an idea of how these conversations might go. Joe and Winston, if you're here, I'd turn around if you don't like seeing yourself on the big screen.

Winston and Joe on the Posit community

So hey, big Winston and Joe, tell us about the Posit community. It is really nice to be in a community where there's a lot of people coming from a lot of different places and everyone gets along. In terms of inclusiveness, that is something that was very intentional. There's also other users groups out there, like Our Ladies. Those things just sort of developed organically. People involved in that did a really great job.

Every time I have an interaction with someone who not only has appreciation for what the software does, but what it's allowed them to do or to become as a person, and especially if that person feels like this is a space that they didn't necessarily feel like they might be welcomed, it is just incredibly motivating for me and for us to go out and do our best work year after year.

Every time I have an interaction with someone who not only has appreciation for what the software does, but what it's allowed them to do or to become as a person, and especially if that person feels like this is a space that they didn't necessarily feel like they might be welcomed, it is just incredibly motivating for me and for us to go out and do our best work year after year.

Life outside of package development

Winston and Joe, what are some things you do outside of package development? In periods in the past, I've done photography pretty intensely. I also do some woodworking. I love cycling. I don't get to do it as much as I would like to, but it's definitely a nice antidote to, I feel like I cram my brain full at work and then cycling lets me sort of release.

And thanks again to you guys for talking to us. And we found everyone we reached out to was really receptive to just chatting and answering questions about their life and what they do outside of coding.

The broader Posit community

But the Pawsit community is so much more than just these developers. It also involves everyone in this room and everyone watching this video. I found the strongest connection through joining my lab with two graduate students there at the time, Nicole and Eric. They now have their PhDs and are off doing wonderful things, but at the time, they were developing their own R packages to do some biological research. So I got hands-on experience and got to contribute to these packages, and not only am I extremely lucky to call these guys my friends, but they also let me have the confidence to create my own package, which is under development.

If you don't have your own team of people that you can meet with every day, there are some great resources through the Pawsit community and their website as well. Things like coming to this conference or checking out their YouTube channel, going to data science hangouts and commenting there and being a part of it, or joining one of these user groups like R-Ladies or the R for data science learning community. Yeah, we got some representation here.

And the R for data science community also runs the Tidy Tuesday if you've ever done that or want to challenge yourself with it.

So hopefully we have planted a seed today to inspire you to connect with the community and the people around you and use those connections to challenge yourself to do something outside your comfort zone to give you the confidence to create something new, whether it be a package, a workflow, or your own unique project.

If you're interested in checking out the podcast, here's a Spotify code. If you want to reach out to Sarah and I, please do. Here are our emails. We'd love to interview some people for the podcast. And for Yi Hui's interview and Mike Love's, feel free to scan this QR code. Thank you. Thank you.