End of year news 2024
RPySoc 2024 - 21-22 November 2024
November was a busy month in the build up to this year’s RPySoc conference which was held in the ICC Birmingham. Some highlights from the event:
Fewer than 15 people did not turn up on the first day, a rarity for events and particularly for those that are free.
Every presenter who said they could come presented even though the weather did cause a slight shuffle of presentation order.
110 attendees were at ICC on day one with 90 coming on day two. Virtually we had 185 day one and 136 day two with people joining globally.
Survey overall rating was 4.5 out of 5 from 79 respondents (both in person and virtual).
We had some fantastic unconference suggestions from data literacy to GitHub discussions.
We had 6 hex stickers that we printed and added those to Jumping Rivers and rainbowR stickers.
Royal Statistical Society brought pin badges and some Significance magazines.
AphA Analysts brought notebooks and pens.
The RPySoc 2024 GitHub repository is where, with permission, we are sharing the conference presentations or links.
Reflections from people on the event were shared on LinkedIn:
Oluwatimilehin Aloro-Olabami who celebrated this as her first presentation at a conference.
Dorota Scott who summarised the conference in her post.
Kasia Banas with her reflections on the conference.
Pablo León Ródenas shared his great memories with links.
Laura Birks sharing a photo of her NHS-R Community mug with tea and her dog in the background.
Simon Wellesley-Miller with a photo of the stickers including the new one for Coffee and Coding.
Rhian Davies with a particular shout out for the unconference
Shaheen Rahamatullah who shared feedback on the virtual experience.
James Sibbit and Elias Altrabsheh from d-fine who presented at the conference.
Zoë Turner who isn’t the only one in her family obsessed with stickers.
And on Bluesky
@paiportasea.bsky.social who shared a great photo of all the hex stickers from the conference.
If you’d like to contribute to these reflections we’d love to hear them and would also welcome sharing them as blogs on the website. Next year will be our final year of funding from The Health Foundation and we can use quotes or blogs on people’s experiences of NHS-R Community activities to help with securing funding.
It’s also a great way to get involved with a Pull Request to a GitHub repository and if you need any help at all get in touch with us through the contact links on our postcard.
Featured in other newsletters/websites
Getting the message out about NHS-R Community is an ongoing thing for us to learn and we are always on the look out for places to promote our events. Here are a couple of new places you’ll see us and feel free to share/let us know of other places we should be:
RSS DS + AI Section Newsletter
Turing Way Newsletter and Turing Way site
AnalystX on FutureNHS Platform (signing in required)
Posit Quarto Website Gallery with links to our website
R package hexSticker Gallery we used the package for 4 stickers and added them to the readme Gallery (it’s alphabetical in order)
_brand.yml we have shared our brand guidelines in the Posit Gallery which can be used for reports, apps, dashboards and plots in Quarto, R and Python. We use the NHS England colours and hopefully the code should be clear enough to update the code for other nation’s colours and logos too.
Data Science Community newsletters - October and November
Finds
Finds for November and December shared in the NHS-R Community Slack:
messy R package to make a data frame messy and untidy.
afcharts R package is an R package for creating accessible plots by the Government Analysis Function. Currently, functions are available for styling ggplot2 plots.
Data Science Professional Development Newsletter which includes a short write up about RPySoc by Jennifer Struthers along with community shout outs to NHS-R and others.
cocoon R package with functions that flexibly format statistical outputs in a way that can be inserted into R Markdown or Quarto documents.
From Rebecca Barter on bluesky:
I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you want to look at all columns of a tibble (which has the somewhat annoying habit of only showing you as many columns as you have space for), just pipe it into print(width = Inf):
df |> print(width = Inf)
Acknowledgements: Zoë Turner, Clare Griffiths, Chris Beeley, Jason Pott and to all those that liked or responded to the posts.
Git/GitHub finds
Markdown highlights (“Note”, “Warning”, “Tip”, “Caution”) using blockquote - used in GitHub in README files, issues and PRs.
From the unconference sessions on GitHub a few links from The Turing Way community “do it with us” workshops on GitHub - many of the exercises you will see in the video will still be “live” and able to be done while you watch the videos.
Committing only part of a file which sparked a conversation about easier ways do do similar using VS Code, GitHub Desktop, and RStudio.
Acknowledgements: Matt Dray, Sophia Batchelor, Zoë Turner and to all those that liked or responded to the posts.
Events 2025
We are using Pretix for our events and have replicated the Core membership we had in the previous WordPress site where we are restricted numbers to events like workshops. Details are in the NHS-R Way book.
We have all the Coffee and Coding events in Pretix which doesn’t require sign up but is a way of getting the calendar invitation and the links. We’ve changed the link for 2025 to come from the NHS-R Community calendar as we experienced issues with accessing recordings from the existing Teams channel.
Finally we have booked some of the Quarto team from Posit to come to a Q&A session on 22nd January 2025. We currently have a limited number to attend to keep the meeting at a size that encourages questions but we will be recording.
Finally
We hope that you have a festive and peaceful break over Christmas and New Year!