Data Science Hangout on all things posit::conf(2024)!
Whether you’re just starting your data science journey, a skilled professional, or a data science leader, posit::conf(2024) has it all, with four talk tracks, community events, updates on product enhancements, all-day workshops, and keynotes from your favorite data scientists. We'd love to have you join us in Seattle (or virtually!) August 12-14, 2024. The Posit team joined us for a special Data Science Hangout to answer any questions you may have about posit::conf(2024), from workshops to talks to advice for first-timers. Helpful links: Conference site: https://posit.co/conference/ Workshops: https://posit.co/blog/workshops-at-posit-conf-2024/ Tips for first time conf attendees blog: https://posit.co/blog/attending-positconf-for-the-first-time/#posit-conf-first-time-tips ________________________ ► Subscribe to Our Channel Here: https://bit.ly/2TzgcOu Follow Us Here: Website: https://www.posit.co LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/posit-software The Hangout is a gathering place for the whole data science community to chat about data science leadership and questions you're all facing that happens every Thursday at 12 ET. To join future data science hangouts, add to your calendar here: https://pos.it/dsh We'd love to have you join us in the conversation live! Thanks for hanging out with us!
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
Welcome back, everyone, to the Data Science Hangout. My name is Randy Zwich. I'm Senior Director of Developer Relations here at Posit. I'm filling in for Rachel, as Curtis mentioned. And of course, we're happy to have all of you here joining us today.
The Hangout is our open space to hear what's going on in the world of data across different industries, to chat about data science leadership, and connect with others facing similar issues as yourselves. We get together here every Thursday at the same time, same Zoom link. And if you're watching this recording and want to join us in the future, the YouTube link will have the details below to give you the ability to add it to your calendars.
Please keep in mind we're dedicated to keeping this a friendly and welcoming space for everyone. And we love hearing from you. So no matter how many years of experience you have, your title, your industry, programming languages you work in, or any other differentiator, we want this to be a welcome space for everybody.
And with that, today's Hangout is dedicated to all things Posit Conf 2024. And so we're going to cover questions from workshops to talks to advice for first timers and anything else that's top of mind for you. And of course, we hope to see many of you at the conference this August in Seattle. Whether you're joining us in person or virtually, it will be my first Posit Conf.
Today I'm joined by four Posit co-hosts. We have Anna, who manages our events and will know a lot about the logistics of Posit Conf. We have Curtis, who, of course, is here, you know, nearly every week. We have the ever-present Hadley Wickham, who will answer whatever he will answer. And then finally, we have Isabella, again, who's also a regular at the Data Science Hangout.
What everyone is most excited about
Well, I'm very excited for the conference to be in Seattle. I used to live in Seattle, and it's absolutely gorgeous in August. Of course, I'm also looking forward to the talks and the networking opportunities that we'll be able to have in that gorgeous Seattle weather.
Compared to last year, I'm excited that we have Windows. That is going to be a big plus to have daylight. I mean, like every year, I'm excited that we just have such an awesome group of speakers who are, like, already starting to get to work on their talks. And I think the other thing that I'm excited about this year is that we are finally communicating the program committee's vision for the talks, which is that there are, like, four talks in a session. And we really highly recommend that you stay there for the whole session. And there is no time in the schedule to get from one room to another, which has caused confusion for folks in the past because we failed to, like, accurately help people understand that. So I think in general, I'm excited that we're doing a lot more this year just to give everyone kind of a big picture view of the program. So it should be easier to navigate and find what you're looking for.
No, I haven't been. I'm fairly new to Posit, but I have looked at a lot of photos and video footage from previous years. So I'm excited to see it in real life. And I understand that the coffee consumption from this community is out of this world. So I'm excited to see if that is actually a true statement.
And I'll add, I mean, we've kind of covered a lot of things that you could cover, the people, the place, the talks. I guess I'd add the stickers. I think we'll probably spend more money than we've ever spent before on stickers, you know. So there should be a huge supply for everyone to take back home.
Advice for first-timers
And, you know, Anna's part kind of transitions into, you know, the next question is, for those of you who have attended, what advice would you give to someone that's attending Posit Conf for the first time?
Face yourself. Our goal on the program committee is to make sure that even if you're at conf, you feel FOMO, because there's, like, always at least one other talk you wish you could be listening to at the same time as this talk. So, you know, like, don't try and see everything. Don't try and do everything. All the talks will be available online pretty much as soon as we can after conf, so you can definitely catch anything you missed afterwards.
Like, it's quite nice to actually be able to attend conf virtually, even if you're there in person. If you need to get away from people for a bit, you can just go up to your hotel room and watch videos from the comfort of your bed.
Sit at a table with people you don't know. That's also a very great just general conference tip, but also a great one here to meet other people. Watch Libby's talk from last year's conference on how to make friends. That's a good pre-conference thing to watch for a lightning talk. Go start attending more data science hangouts now so that you can, like, pre-game up to conf, like, meet more people.
There will be an opening reception on the night of the 12th after the workshops for a couple hours, so you can pick up your badge. If you didn't attend the workshops, meet some people, grab a drink.
Last year Rachel did a happy hour specifically for this group, so that might be on the cards again. That was fun. That was in a tiki bar in Chicago.
Always stay at the conference hotel. Good advice for all conferences, yes. It's always great when you can just wander around and walk, don't have to figure out public transport.
Oh yeah, and if you're coming from another country, be aware that like it's going to be cold inside because hotels in the US are always set at like 68 degrees. And it's like weather. There's like nothing you can do about it except dress for the conditions, so regardless of what temperature it's going to be in Seattle, like make sure you bring like a warm jacket or throw something to stay cozy in the hotel.
Yeah, I mean, one of the goals of our goals for conf is just to make it like as welcoming and inclusive as possible, so I know lots of people come. It might be like the only user of the organization, although now we're starting to see companies bring a bunch of people, which is also very cool. But we also know, by and large, it's kind of an introverted crowd at conf, so the Pac-Man rule is just like whenever you're standing in a group of people, make sure to leave like Pac-Man's mouth open so other new people can join, so we want to, you know, make it as easy as possible for you to like walk up and say hi to folks. And I think hopefully this year we'll do the birds of a feather pins as well, so just things you can like add to your lanyard topics you're interested in, so when you're like, someone might be a stranger, but if they're interested in the same things as you, that's a great conversation starter.
Building the conference program
That's a good question. I think, you know, like a lot of it is driven by just who submits, because that tends to be kind of fairly well correlated with like what people are thinking about. I think like this year, obviously, the kind of hot topic is like generative AI and LLMs, so we're going to, you know, they came up a bunch of times, we're going to have a keynote speaker specifically about that, but I know it's going to come up in other keynote talks as well. So I think it's just like, you know, one of the things that we're like hearing about in the community from our customers, you know, and calls like this, Rachel's on the program committee, so she does a great job of kind of making sure we're thinking about the stuff that you all are thinking about and worrying about. Yeah, but it's tough. It's tough. That's like a big part, like a big part of the challenge is going, you know, taking all 300 something submissions, getting them scored, and then like starting to form a cohesive program out of them to try and get some order from the chaos.
Workshops
Maybe just switching gears for a second to the workshops. I know several people on this chat are giving workshops. Does anybody want to make a plug for either the favorite workshop they want to attend or the workshop that they're going to be delivering?
Not TAing any workshops, but I am looking forward to seeing the resources from build a Quarto dashboard and just seeing, you know, it's a new feature that came out in Quarto 1.4, and, you know, constantly developing and looking forward to seeing like all the possibilities with Quarto dashboards.
I'm TAing the databases one, which is my background, you know, prior to Posit. I joined in January. At one time, I could program in R. Recently, I have found out my skills have atrophied to the point where all of my employees would prefer I didn't write R. And so it'll be good, you know, from my perspective, as new to the company, but not new to data science. I'm actually looking to get that overview of everything that Posit's doing.
Yeah, I'm going to be teaching R reproduction, which I will hopefully know enough about by the time that workshop comes around to give a good talk, but I'm, like, giving it as a way to, like, force myself to learn it, to learn more about it. So I've been giving a few talks about it and working on P tools, but I think that should be fun. Hopefully a fun workshop.
I don't think AI is, like, ready for that quite yet. Maybe one day, we'll see. It's interesting, like, I use it a bunch in RStudio with the co-pilot integration, and it's just kind of surprising to see, like, what it's good at, what it's bad at, but I don't know, I very mixed feelings about it.
I think that's because we've just done Advanced Shiny for R, like, basically every conf so far, and felt like that knowledge is kind of, like, at least percolated somewhat to the community. I think we did, I think also, I mean, there's also Level Up Shiny for, Level Up with Shiny for R, which is kind of similar, not quite as advanced, but I think it includes quite a lot of the, like, some of the content from the previous Advanced R ones, too.
Yeah, I think that makes sense. You know, obviously, Shiny for R has been around well over a decade, if I'm not mistaken. Shiny for Python is a little newer, so we're spending a little bit more time getting the word out for Shiny for Python. But, of course, both have, are under active development at Posit, and so it's not really one or the other, but really, you know, which language you prefer, or, you know, what you might be doing.
Yeah, we're also interested to see just how people kind of like the one day of tutorials instead of the two days of tutorials. We're kind of hoping it means that, like, more people will come to the tutorial, since it's only three days in total. Instead of four days in total. And I also have to say, personally, I'm looking forward to having one this day of conf. So, although that's it, we're going to do a Tidyverse developer day, the day after conf. I should add a link to that, if any of you are interested in contributing to the Tidyverse, we have a whole day planned for that afterwards. So, it's normally a pretty fun event, if you have any interest in contributing a little bit to open source packages. We kind of assume you don't know anything, or we assume you know a little bit about packages, you've used packages, maybe you've used a little bit of GitHub before, but, you know, we have a bunch of helpers to make sure that everyone achieves something and makes some improvement to the Tidyverse in some small way.
Yeah, I was just saying, like, don't choose a workshop that's more advanced than your skill level. I went to RStudioConf 2022, and my, the workshop I chose was slightly above my skill level and I couldn't really follow along. So, I didn't really feel like I got the most utility out of it. So, that's just my suggestion.
Yeah, I was just saying, like, don't choose a workshop that's more advanced than your skill level. I went to RStudioConf 2022, and my, the workshop I chose was slightly above my skill level and I couldn't really follow along. So, I didn't really feel like I got the most utility out of it.
Virtual attendance and capturing notes
So yeah, absolutely. This year we're going to have another discord if you haven't used discord before it's like an online chatting platform where you have various channels for different like interests or the talks and things like that. And people share resources and chat with each other there. And then, in addition to that, there is live Q and a, where that's open to anybody watching the talk. And so if you're able to join us live, you're able to ask questions of the speakers as well.
Yeah, and I'll add like if you don't want to stay up all night, watching the sessions live. They will be uploaded into your attendee portal within like 15 minutes after each talk has happened so you can definitely wait till the next morning to watch a talk as well. And then the plan to put them on YouTube like a month later or something two months later, it will go on YouTube like I don't know the timeframe but yeah.
I will say I use notion for everything. So I'm very fast at it. Whatever you're using, make sure that it's not the first time you're using it. Be comfortable with it. So if you are way faster at using Quarto or R Markdown to take notes and like create cells quickly and do all that stuff, I would say use that. I use notion because I'm super fast at it and I know all the keyboard shortcuts. But using Quarto would be like my, the option that I would use or tell people to use for sure.
I think I used. I think it's called Otter. I'm the one that often jumps into zoom calls and starts transcribing and I think it could do other videos as well so I tried the free trial. And it was really nice because you could, you know, Control F for text. And then you could then go to jump to that section you know and hear that kind of that part of the recording. And then it would also do kind of a summary, I feel some of the summary like if you have an hour long thing, the summaries are not all that great sometimes you can kind of start creating good sections for you. But that control that thing was super useful you know like I wanted to. Every time someone said shiny or something like that you just control that that pull it up and you can kind of see all those moments. So super easy to kind of like go through the video.
You have to say I find attending like talks live really hard now because I'm so used to watching them on YouTube and like double speed it seems like it's like agonizingly slow when people talk at a normal speed. And then there's no subtitles to like quickly skim. So I did, I definitely prefer watch the talks after watching live.
Getting to the venue and local tips
I have a question that's perhaps for Anna, if you know, with the positive conf location. Is it within walking distance of any sort of transit hub, how are people, presumably, you know, most people will arrive by plane. How do you get from from that airport to where the conference will actually be.
Yeah, that's a good question. So I haven't actually been to the venue yet but I am going next week, so I'll be able to test this out, and we can probably add more FAQ info on this on the website but from my understanding is it's roughly 20 to 30 minutes from the airport to get there by car. I'm sure there is public transport links. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's right there is a train that goes directly from the airport to really really close to the hotel, and it's very convenient and smooth so highly recommend it. If you're getting in a good time, I think it stops at midnight or so.
It's great. You're like the hotels and a great area there's tons of stuff you can walk to nearby. Yeah, yeah and around the hotel Seattle is a really big bus city so there are different neighborhoods that you want to explore and anything like that there's a lot of buses that can get you there. Pike Place Market is super close to the hotel venue.
Sure. So, I'm commenting like a walking distance from the hotel there also a ton of things do. And one of my favorite things is to eat. And so highly recommend been typhoon, which is, I believe, in a mall called Wesley place something like that. And top floor has delicious food, including soup dumplings spicy wontons string beans. It's very, very good.
Birds of a feather and community networking
I have a question about birds of a feather this year. Curtis can you maybe talk a little bit about that. What is birds of a feather and sort of, you know, what's the purpose of it.
It's just, it's just about networking and kind of community and reaching folks that you want to reach. So, if you could give me 60 seconds to tell a story, I'll do my best like I was talking to Eric Nance, who, you know, he does our weekly he does our podcast series. He told me he went to the first positive conference feel cough which was shiny cough over at Stanford, and he was talking about how one of the awesome things that came out of that get together was that there was a whole bunch of pharma shiny developers, all located in one place. So on the sidelines of that conference, they started kind of self organizing and like so browser and, you know, a lot of all those folks, they then started R/Pharma. And out of R/Pharma emerged like a lot of really cool stuff so like if you Google that our consortium FDA submissions group right. It's a group of shiny developers who work in life sciences, pharma basically. And they're just, they're just working together and working with the FDA to encourage them to adopt open source particularly shiny and R in FDA submissions and across the industry.
And out of R/Pharma emerged like a lot of really cool stuff so like if you Google that our consortium FDA submissions group right. It's a group of shiny developers who work in life sciences, pharma basically. And they're just, they're just working together and working with the FDA to encourage them to adopt open source particularly shiny and R in FDA submissions and across the industry.
And, you know, Eric kind of puts that up is like, this is just one of the awesome things, not I mean not just positive positive conf in particular, but, but attending these other things in person. You know, like if you go to the agenda on for positive this year and you kind of put shiny in the search. There's a whole bunch of shiny tracks or shiny, you know, sets of talks and in that room will be hundreds of people who are shiny developers. So if you're looking for kind of ways to kind of connect with people who are using the same tools, working on the same problems often working in the same fields. That's a great way to do it, and then birds of a feather, the goal there is to just create more opportunities for you to connect with people that you really want to connect with so it's usually by industry by tool. So we'll almost certainly have something for like, you know, meet the shiny team for example, if Hadley and team is open for, you know, meet the tidy verse team at like the lounge. So there's industry ones like public sector and life science. And there's usually an educator one like a positive conference usually between 200 and 300 people who teach courses. So we try to like give them opportunity to connect with each other. So that's, that's the goal of birds of a feather, you know, flock together so like plant a flag and meet with each other.
Closing and community events
That's right, I was just pulling up the link. So on the day right after the last keynote, we are going to have an R-Ladies by ladies mixer with R-Ladies Seattle and Pilates Seattle. I just put the meetup link in the chat. We'd love to see you there. And we'll discuss I was a co organizer for R-Ladies Seattle and it's an amazing group, highly recommended.
Again, for all of you that that attended today and of course that that attend that each week. You know the data science hangout. Again, it's really just a place for all of us to get together, share and learn together and so hopefully you learned about Posit Conf if you had any open questions, of course, if there are other questions. Feel free to answer questions, ask questions there. And if you want to get more info, you can send a message to conf at posit.co. And if you have specific questions. And of course, if you have questions about your specific attendance, please feel free to ask there. Otherwise, again, thanks everybody for attending, and I hope to see some or all of you in Seattle.