I ♥ data. But I also ♥ privacy. Even though I have been running a few data meetups for the past few years, I have managed to keep myself out of public eye - even in my professional life. I must admit, I’m giving a bit away in an recent interview with Data Science Weekly. They had excellent questions to pose, and I’d like to take a moment here to summarize two main points from the interview: my thoughts on when and how much time it took me to became a data scientist and how I feel about the hype in the field today. If you’d like, you can read the full interview here.
“At one point, the only source for daily R news was David Smith’s blog.” – Szilard Pafka
David Smith is an integral part of the R community. His background in computational statistics goes back to the early 90s . David has worked at Revolution R, one of the leading R companies, for nearly a decade. His name has been included in lists such as:
“One can acquire everything in solitude except character.”
― Stendhal
The Interview # Tal Galili is, in many ways, a central spoke of the R community. Both gregarious and thoughtful, he has grown his website R-bloggers into the definitive aggregation of the R community’s voice through his genuine, passion-driven intensity. Tal had a simple desire as a young programmer - to learn more about his chosen tools - and looked to the internet to find other voices like his. When googling for “R blogs”, Tal found numerous blogs about pirates, but only a handful about R. This interview details how Tal started R-bloggers and decided to challenge the status quo, as well as giving us a peek behind the curtain for his new projects.
Hadley Wickham is famous. He’s not Kardashian famous, but walking around useR! and seeing the community’s reaction to him, there’s no question, he’s ‘R famous’. If you have the good fortune to see his talks, tutorials, or sessions in person, you owe it to yourself to do so. He projects depth and wisdom with a booming voice, which combines with a hard-won confidence brought about by years of honing his craft and developing his expertise. He takes as much time as is needed to answer questions, listens to every single bit of feedback and succeeds in making you feel that what you say indeed matters. Hadley Wickham has poise. It’s also quite obvious, if you watch him for long enough, that this fame suits him like an itchy sweater made by a loving grandparent. It brings warmth and it comes from a place of love, but it’s always a little uncomfortable regardless of how well it may fit.
Many of us here in the DataScience.LA Team were also involved in organizing the useR! 2014 conference, the annual get-together of the wonderful R community, which brought over 700 R users and developers from all over the world to Los Angeles this past July.
