My experience as curator of @WeAreRLadies
To be honest, I took days preparing for my curator week so I had collected information, made a plan and trying to learn to use twitter 🙈 Still, it did not work very smoothly. Only on my second day I learned (or rather, the very nice ex-curator @PipingHotData taught me) how to upload gifs and how to make threads. Anyway, I survived and I got some nice comments, so hopefully people enjoyed it.
First, what an honor to curate the twitter account of a community that I love and follow closely. Especial honor for it being on International Women’s Day!! This day I wanted to focus on people that have inspired me and especially to some #Latinx women. I find the R-Ladies community super enriching but I am normally not into posting myself, so that was a challenge. However, if I am serious about my professional and personal development, I feel that I have to go out of my comfort zone.
On the next days I shared some info that I do not want to forget (yes, I know, I shared it but that does not mean I have all those links on top of my head). Here is a small summary:
Putting your code in production:
I mainly talked about what it means and the struggles. From here, what I want to highligh are the package management techniques:
renv
for day-to-day package management.conda
for multi-language (mostly Python with a bit of R) package management.miniCRAN
for package management in a whole company. Ensuring security and access to common libraries.Containers: including Docker and Singularity.
_ Very nice video to understand containers + R (by Elizabeth Stark, useR2018): https://t.co/2wI9JqEkDS?amp=1- Another well-explained video by R-Ladies Tunis and Rami Krispin as speaker: https://t.co/8zxQ7BTGmQ?amp=1
- Of course, the link to “rocker”, the most used Docker container recipes for R: https://t.co/HPQbXs2NOG?amp=1
- Another well-explained video by R-Ladies Tunis and Rami Krispin as speaker: https://t.co/8zxQ7BTGmQ?amp=1
Rmarkdown extensions:
This was a good one I think. I enlisted many Rmarkdown extensions and asked people to add more if they could. Not many were added but still, I loved the list. The full list is going into a separate collection (for now a Google Spreadsheet) where I can keep adding stuff.
We talked before about built-in output formats in #rmarkdown but what about extensions or diff. templates?!! I ❤ {xaringan}, {bookdown} and {blogdown}. But I also (want to) use other pkgs that are less mentioned. C’mon guys, I know you can add more here! 1/n pic.twitter.com/WDon5dPz6Z
— We are R-Ladies (@WeAreRLadies) March 10, 2021
Learning CSS:
I gave some suggestions but the ones from @yabellini were way better!
Time to get glamourous with #rmarkdown… We have talked about making documents and using formats/extensions. But if you want to customize and “prettify” your html output, sooner or lated you need #css. I have some resouces to learn it. Do you know more? pic.twitter.com/MGNtQStgGU
— We are R-Ladies (@WeAreRLadies) March 10, 2021
Under-appreciated R-packages:
This one was the one with more reactions. I got to hear about so many nice packages! Now looking forward to try them all! For now I just link the main tweet here but I am making a document collecting all the names.
Everyone talks about #RMarkdown ggplot2 and their extensions. But we all have some pkgs that we use all the time and that get less credit! What are the pkgs/tools that you love and that you feel they are under-appreciated? Here there are some of mine! pic.twitter.com/lnqxIBHEN7
— We are R-Ladies (@WeAreRLadies) March 11, 2021
Animations and Interactive plots:
I shared {plotly} with a special mention to the ggplotly() function that I use quite often to convert my ggplot objects to a plotly one.
{gganimate} is what I use and love to make animations.
{tweenr} can also be used for this purpose and seems to be smoother in some cases: https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/05/tweenr.html
{leaflet} for interactive maps.
{DT} for interactive tables. Although lately it seems that {gt} is getting some very nice cool features.
@loreabad6 suggested {tmap} for interactive maps and gifs.
{highcharter} seems to be better than {plotly} for time-series visualizations according to @Jack36161714.
Material to learn R Shiny:
I shared some material to learn/get deeper into R-Shiny and also got some nice suggestions.
- Mastering Shiny book by Hadley Wickham
- Engineering Production-Grade Shiny Apps (engineering-shiny.org)
- Golem package talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE6TnUV4nC4
- @cosima_meyer shared a blog post collection some methods for R-shiny: https://www.mzes.uni-mannheim.de/socialsciencedatalab/article/shiny-apps/
- She also shared some slides about “Talking Shiny”: https://cosimameyer.rbind.io/slides/correlcon/talk#1
- Some nice tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OxokLdZQgQ
- Some from RStudio: https://shiny.rstudio.com/tutorial/written-tutorial/lesson1/ or https://shiny.rstudio.com/tutorial/
- Animation and interactivity in R: https://animation-and-interactivity-in-r.netlify.app/#Creating_an_app_with_shiny
- Laderast gradual intro to Shiny: https://laderast.github.io/gradual_shiny/
Podcasts that might be interesting for the #rstats community:
I shared most of them but did get a couple of suggestions.
- CoRecursive: coding stories
- BioinfoChat about bioinformatics topics
- The Bioinformatics and Beyond Podcast
- The PolicyVizPodcast
- Cautionary Tales by Tim Harford
- Talking to strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
- Casual Inference by two R-Ladies @LucyStats and @EpiEllie
- Build a Career in Data Science
Tips to take full advantage of RStudio:
I retweeted a tip from @shannon000 about how to use rainbow parentheses in RStudio. This tool allows you to easily see which pair of parentheses belong together. As an answer, @thomas_mock shared many nicer tips that I collect here:
A very nice 5-min video showing all the new features of the new version of RStudio. This was simply amazing! Especially the fact that you can now write RMarkdown code in a visual editor (similar to normal text editors). Needles to say, that is how I am writing this post right now! The video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdMPh5uphO0
Another nice tip is to set the option to have a margin (basically a line on your source code panel) that let’s you see if you passed the 80-character limit. I love it. It forces me to think about not writing too long code in one same line. You get it through Tools>Global Options>Code>Display and just clicking on the option. Btw, there you can also activate the rainbow parentheses. This last one is just available in the last version of RStudio.
Tutorial about Code Snippets in RStudio: https://jozef.io/r906-rstudio-snippets/
Really a GREAT list of RStudio shortcuts and tips: https://appsilon.com/rstudio-shortcuts-and-tips/
Another very nice (and a bit shorter) list of shortcuts and tips: https://www.dataquest.io/blog/rstudio-tips-tricks-shortcuts/
Using project templates in RStudio: https://towardsdatascience.com/using-rstudio-project-templates-to-help-the-project-standardization-in-data-science-teams-a963db12abac
Bioinformatics packages:
I mentioned {DESeq2} for RNA-seq differential expression analysis.
{dada2} and {phyloseq} for analyzing 16S-sequencing data for microbiome research.
{ggtree} for phylogenetic trees.
{BentoBox} for making specialized genomics plots and multi-panel plots that I am dying to test.
@its_JPhilipp recommended also {Biostrings} for sequences.
@Nv_pyromelana recommended {vegan} for diversity data, {RMark} for mark recapture studies and {nlme} for random effects models.
@LukeAnderTroc recommended {Riverplot} for making custom sankey diagrams.
These are not the only topics I covered. However, these were my favorites, where more reactions or just valuable info was shared. It was really a great and even dare to say overwhelming week but I do think I enjoyed it a lot. I definitely want to curate again for this great community!