James Laird-Smith

Data Scientist at the @BankofEngland. Previously at the @FinancialTimes and University of Cape Town. 🩴🇿🇦

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

Can anyone explain why Kamala Harris hasn't download my R package from CRAN yet? I understand she's on the campaign trail, but all she needs is an internet connection. Technical difficulties? #rstats

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

#rstats friends, I have a question: given that I have some built R package on disk, what is the blessed/easiest way can I (programmatically) check if it's in source or binary format? Beyond just checking the file extension.

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

Back in November I did a webinar for the @NHSrCommunity on "Customising your R experience". The video is now up: https://t.co/ajgq88zsWA #rstats

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

@NicholasStrayer's great talk at posit::conf(2023) is now also available on YouTube. #rstats https://t.co/xtTNmk8rSd

[Nick Strayer @NicholasStrayer]

📢The {ShinyUiEditor} is finally out of its "alpha" stage! 📢
We've taken off the big scary warning about using it and want you to take it for a whirl.
See my post about this on the Posit blog:
https://t.co/OwLwN1oaTZ
#rstats #DataScience

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

New categorical colour scheme just dropped 🎤🤩 #rstats

[Mike Bostock @mbostock]

The new observable10 categorical color scheme by @pettiross features a more saturated vibe to help charts pop. And it looks great in dark mode. 😎

[NHS-R Community @NHSrCommunity]

📢 November Webinar 📢

We are very excited to announce that the incredible James Laird-Smith will be presenting a ‘Customising your R Experience’ webinar on Wednesday 29th November 2023!

Click here to register:
https://t.co/u3UYJS0nE6

#NHSr #RStats #DataScience #NHSRCommunity

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

This Wednesday (Nov 29th) I'm excited to be giving a webinar to the NHS-R Community on "Customising your R experience"! It's going to be at 1pm GMT. Registration link is here, but it will also be recorded. #rstats https://t.co/iePVXC54uz

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

At 5pm (BST) on Thursday I'm going to be a guest on
@posit_pbc's Data Science Hangout speaking about the work I do for the @bankofengland and supporting its 1000 R users. #rstats There's no need to register, you can join the stream using this link: https://t.co/OOaMHxLJ5a

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

Is it wrong that, when the NYT crossword clue is "something to stub", my first thought is 'function' and not 'toe'? 😅 #rstats

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

@EmilyRiederer I always do this too ����. Maybe we should start templating the date field with stop() if it's in the past? #rstats

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

@ajordannafa Awesome. Thanks!

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

@ajordannafa Do you have recommendations for where I could read more about this?

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

There's a lot of be said for removing cognitive overhead for developers. By using withr I'm saved the decision of where to put temporary directories or remembering to reset compiler flags. A huge thank you to the authors for this very sleek and amazingly useful package!

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

I've been doing a bunch of #rstats package 📦 install testing this week. And the withr package (as usual!) just makes the experience so much easier and cleaner. 🤩👇

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

Here's an example where I create a function to install a package in a temporary directory, with temporary libpaths and with temporary compiler flags. And it's just so straightforward! I don't need to worry about global state because I know withr will take care of it for me.

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

@dandekadt I haven't tried it myself, but I was blown away by this talk at Strange Loop which uses Julia to demo doing this: https://t.co/b9d1fHgLeK

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

After a hard day of wrangling data from APIs, I'm very seriously considering naming my first child `tidyr::unnest_wider()`. I mean, just look how easy it makes converting highly nested JSON into a tidy data frame?! 🤩 Friday #rstats fun!

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

Have you ever wanted to generate random but readable strings? Like for files or folders? Today's Friday #rstats fun is thanks to @rgfitzjohn for the ids package📦 and its wonderful `adjective_animal()` 😻function.

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

Today's Friday #rstats fun: I discovered the (experimental) `tree()` function in the lobstr package for the pretty-printing of lists. So much cleaner than `str()`! 😍🗒️ Thanks @NicholasStrayer!

[James Laird-Smith @JLS_DataScience]

@polesasunder I used to. Then I learned how few papers actually publish their data and code in full.