The Manchester R Meet Up is inviting all comers to its October 5 session – and you don’t even need to have heard of R to attend.
The group describes itself as “friendly and local R professionals, meeting regularly in-person to share our passion for data and coding.”
It added: “Whether you have never heard of R, mainly code in Python, or you’ve been using R since 1993 – we’d love you to join.”
The spooky-themed, and free, October event is supported by Brighton-based data consultancy Datacove, which has past experience of founding well-attended events for the R and Python communities, and Northern tech recruitment specialist Better Placed.
The Meet Up takes place at The Live Lounge in Ancoats and will be hosted by Abbie Brookes and Zac Nash from Datacove.
Speaking at the event will be Sean Burton, who is a geospatial data consultant at Azura Earth. Burton will be sharing his experiences of using R with geospatial data and says his talk will cover “how I integrated my interest in maps with my career in data to become a GIS/geospatial data freelancer using R. From the fun and frustration of working with different map projections, all the way to 3D-animated built environment data visualisations using Shiny.”
The second speaker on the night will be Nic Crane, the “maintainer of the R Arrow package”, who will be delivering a talk entitled Efficiently Engineering Bigger Data with Arrow.
Crane said: “Data analysis pipelines with larger-than-memory data are becoming more and more commonplace. There are often blurred lines between data science and data engineering, and knowing a bit of both is a surefire way to make your life easier when working with big datasets.”
The event kicks off with drinks and pizza from 6pm, with the talks scheduled to commence at around 6:30pm. It all wraps up at 8:30pm, although the organisers promise the chat will continue at a yet-to-be-decided local hostelry.
If the Meet Up team didn’t already have you at “free drinks and pizza,” then the promise of free R Merchandise sent by Posit may just tip the balance. Posit Workbench, for the uninitiated, is “the preferred development tool for R and Python developers.”
