RStudio::conf Videos and Shiny
This weekend i had planned to continue to read more data science research papers & journals but then I managed to wander into the RStudio website and watched some of the talks from RStudio::conf 2020. I went down a rabbit hole and picked through the last 4–5 years and was up until 3am watching talks about Rproject templates, LaTeX templates, parameterization of RMarkdown documents, and how academics are using this medium to automate and ease their lives. I also watched a few on shiny.
Now, I feel its worth stating that I've bounced around several languages over the years just hopping around and learning the basics caught in tutorial hell but mostly just curious about everything and how different layers of software work. Now i think i'm finally settling on where i want to really put my time, energy, and focus. I have absolutely fallen in love with R and data science. I'm absolutely in love with writing R code and using RStudio to create packages, documents, analyze my data set, etc. I love R for many reasons, one is that it managed to keep my interest long enough and deeply enough that ive managed to get an ok level of skill with it. I like writing R. The next major factor was that the amount of effort it takes to create a decent looking, and somewhat useful product with R/Rmarkdown is so minimal it floored me. RMarkdown is one of the greatest things in the world to me, I do everything with it.
Watching these RStudio::conf videos inspired me to continue on this path, i LOVE R and I've already spent hundreds of dollars on books about R and im subscribed to several news letters, i've followed #rstats on twitter, I even have my own package on CRAN now. All of this is so exciting to me because i want to be really good at R but i also want to be able to use it for a practical purpose; i want to be good at data science. In learning R, using the RMarkdown medium, watching Luke Smith's videos, and seeing everyone on #rstats with PhD's, It's been ongoing for almost a year, but i want to return to school now and learn more about statistics and data science, this inspiration even has me learning about calculus when in school i was just not very motivated and kind of did well, but only because i was trying to just get schooling over with and get to work. Now im inspired to take my learning to the next level and apply these skills to production environments and real life business use cases. Life is very exiciting for me right now and im so inspired to continue learning.