Accessing CRAN from an internet-less LAN

If you were in an environment where you have R running on server on a secure LAN with no internet access, you’ll be familiar with the situation outlined in the image above. R is running in an environmnet where there is no internet access, and you’re therefore unable to install anything from CRAN. This is common in many large organisations where the security of the systems is more important than end user convenience.

Talk: Easing the Path to Production - APIs in R

ODSC London, October 2016 For some reason the audio is really bad for the first couple of minutes, and the projector kept glitching when I tried to run the demos, but apart from that, it was great! The issues with the projector actually only lasted a couple of minutes (before I dropped all the demos) but it felt like ages! If you’ve ever given a talk that didn’t go according to plan you’ll probably know how that feels.

Controlling lights from within the RStudio IDE

I completely forgot that I made this silly video last year. It’s terrible quality, but it basically shows me using a Shiny gadget that I wrote to control a light in my house, all from the comfort of the RStudio IDE. Obvioulsy that’s not really what Shiny gadgets were intended for, but it’s always fun to to do odd things with cool technologies! The gadget itself is written to take advantage of the super simple API’s that I wrote for my Energenie Remote Control Project.

RStats - Plumber launcher script

Plumber Launcher Script I use Jeff Allen’s Plumber a lot. If you haven’t seen it and want to start writing APIs in R, I’d strongly encourage you to check it out. Jeff’s documentation tells you how to start the API that you’ve written, with the following code: > library(plumber) > r <- plumb("myfile.R") # Where 'myfile.R' is the path to your plumber file > r$run(port=8000) This is fine if you’re working directly in RStudio and want to start your API endpoints running, but what about in a production environment?

Talk: R *is* Production Safe

EARL Boston, November 2016 I was really pleased to be asked to speak at EARL Boston again this year. On this occasion I was asked to talk about using R in production and whether it’s really possible/advisable or not. For those of us within the R Community, it almost seems like a silly question but, based on my experiences working with those outside the community, it can be a very real fear.

MacOS Key Re-Mapping

A brief overview of the config used to remap the unused section key to the hash/pound symbol

Talk: R as a Service

R in Insurance, July 2016 I was a last minute stand in for a colleague and had to pull this together really quickly. Add to that the fact that it was a lightning talk, which is a format I hadn’t tried before and it made puting the talk together quite challenging. I was pretty happy with what I wanted to say, I’d done related talks before, but trying to distil that down into something that I could comfortably fit into the 10 minute slot proved to be a slower process than I’d have liked.