Mike Thomas is Chief Data Scientist at Ketchbrook Analytics, with background in credit risk modeling, regression & time series forecasting, machine learning, recommendation engines, and natural language processing. In addition, Mike has extensive data visualization experience across a variety of software products and technologies. Passionate about reproducibility and following healthy software development practices in data science.
Mike Thomas has hosted 98 Episodes.
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Issue 2024-W13 Highlights
March 27th, 2024 | 38 mins 59 secs
How a recent pivot in one of the most popular testing frameworks in R unlocks mocking once again, bringing robust grammar checks to your R development environment with rspell, and flex your Shiny and HTML design muscles with flexbox.
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Issue 2024-W12 Highlights
March 20th, 2024 | 46 mins 44 secs
An honest take on common patterns and anti-patterns for re-use of data analyses that hit a bit too close to home for your hosts, a cautionary tale of garbage online references pretending to be authentic material, and a new (human-created) cheat sheet with terrific best practices taking front and center.
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Issue 2024-W11 Highlights
March 13th, 2024 | 48 mins 32 secs
A collection of tips for spreading the good word about your awesome R package, how spring cleaning a package codebase doesn't have to be a dreadful experience thanks to usethis, and the culmination of a learning journey to bootstrap node JS projects powered by webR.
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Issue 2024-W10 Highlights
March 6th, 2024 | 46 mins 40 secs
ow an attempt to solve a clever programming exercise led to a new patch to the R language itself, a review of the enlightening results for the recent data.table community survey, and creating a Doom map in R, because why not?
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Issue 2024-W09 Highlights
February 28th, 2024 | 46 mins 8 secs
Flipping a Hello World function on its head, assorted improvements landing in ggplot2 3.5.0, and why authoring beautiful code is so worth it.
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Issue 2024-W08 Highlights
February 21st, 2024 | 47 mins 16 secs
Putting those bike pedals to work with a comprehensive exploratory data analysis, navigating through a near-inferno of namespace and dependency issues in package development, and how you can ensure bragging rights during your next play of Guess My Name using decision trees.
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Issue 2024-W07 Highlights
February 14th, 2024 | 34 mins 49 secs
A few great tips for ensuring your R package doesn't "talk too much" (within reason), shrinking down the size of your images with a new API directly available in a new package, and the first opportunity in 2024 for submitting your proposals for R Consortium projects is on the horizon.
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Issue 2024-W06 Highlights
February 7th, 2024 | 44 mins 34 secs
Key learnings from learners in recent R workshops, advice on navigating thorny package installation issues within renv, and a showdown of how the parquet and RDS formats perform with large data sets.
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Issue 2024-W05 Highlights
January 31st, 2024 | 23 mins 39 secs
The R-Weekly Highlights podcast has crossed another milestone with episode 150! In this episode we cover a terrific collection of development nuggets of wisdom revealed in a recent package review livestream, and how a feature flying under the radar from Git can facilitate investigations of multiple package versions.
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Issue 2024-W04 Highlights
January 24th, 2024 | 43 mins 56 secs
How the babeldown package enables low-friction updates to living documents, uncovering innovative functions all within the base R installation, and supercharging a static Quarto dashboard with interactive tables and visualizations.
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Issue 2024-W03 Highlights
January 17th, 2024 | 44 mins 41 secs
A tour of how the httr2 package streamlines API processing in R, five must-have ggplot2 extension packages for your next visualization, and the Appsilon Shiny Conf 2024 is shaping up to be the biggest yet for all things Shiny.
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Issue 2024-W02 Highlights
January 10th, 2024 | 59 mins 9 secs
We kick off 2024 with a jam-packed episode! Learn four ways to streamline your R workflows, a proposal for a new pipe assignment operator in base R, and our raw responses to a surprising turn of events affecting one of the most influential members of the R community.
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Issue 2023-W50 Highlights
December 13th, 2023 | 43 mins 40 secs
A data-driven investigation to the association of early birthdays and hockey players, one of the most-requested feature requests is coming to the next version of Quarto, and just why in the world does the View() function start with V?
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Issue 2023-W49 Highlights
December 6th, 2023 | 36 mins 35 secs
A timely collection of tips and tricks in adopting the cli package for your R package interfaces, how the deposits package addresses an all-to-familiar problem of sharing research data, and an encore of creating your own RStats-wrapped of your most used R functions.
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Issue 2023-W48 Highlights
November 30th, 2023 | 50 mins 34 secs
A glimpse of refactoring functional R code to object-oriented programming with R6, using benchmarking as another input to adopting package dependencies, and building a high-performance CSV reader by combining R and Rust.
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Issue 2023-W45 Highlights
November 11th, 2023 | 43 mins 6 secs
From the "is there anything R cannot do" department comes QR code scanning, a tidy time series analysis on a major problem in the roads of Pittsburgh, and rolling up your sleeves with custom ggplot2 tricks to enhance a spatial visualization.