We are thrilled to welcome Chris Baltzer, a senior software developer and fellow dog lover from Halifax, who is joining our team in Montreal full time starting August 1, 2018.

When a makeup junkie uses R to explore data

You can download your facebook message history from your personal account, under Setting. Click on Download a copy of your Facebook data. In the zip file, you will get all the photos, messages and posts you have sent in the past.

I read data into R from spreadsheets all the time, but today I had a google sheets document from a google survey that I wanted to upload.

The plotly package in R enables users to create interactive graphics via the plotly.js library. This past weekend I was lucky to attend a PLOTCON, a hands-on workshop taught by the package developer, Carson Sievert, at plotly headquarters in Montreal.

One of the greatest thing about R is the thousands of packages available on CRAN and Github. Without being a pro on programming, this lets you to do pretty cool things thanks to all the hard work done by the community.

R-Ladies is an a world-wide organization dedicated to promoting gender diversity in the R programmers community. They have an active online presence as well as local chapters located in dozens of cities across many countries.

I mainly use R to manipulate and summarize data and it's my statistical software of choice. As a hobbyist programmer, each language has its quirks, but fundamentally, many are linked genealogically.

INLA is a nice (fast) alternative to MCMC for fitting Bayesian models. They each have some pros and cons, but while MCMC is a pretty intuitive method to learn and even implement yourself in simple scenarios, the INLA algorithms were a mathematical stretch for me. 

I worked for a few years with academics who insisted on using SAS. It was a new language for me but as I became more experienced, I grew to really enjoy using it.