Podcasts Technology Datacast Episode 7: Building Open-Source R packages with Thomas Lin Pedersen

Episode 7: Building Open-Source R packages with Thomas Lin Pedersen

Published: Jan. 11, 2019, 1:30 p.m.

Show Notes:

  • (2:16) Thomas talked about the study of Food Science and Technology in which he focused on microbiology.
  • (3:15) Thomas stressed the importance of user empathy, something useful he gained from his degree.
  • (4:39) Thomas discussed the reason to pursue a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics at the Technical University of Denmark.
  • (6:10) Thomas talked in-depth about the tools he developed for his Ph.D. thesis, which are able to handle large-scale pangenome analyses using sequential data.
  • (9:11) Thomas talked about using the ggplot2 package for his R package “Find My Friends.”
  • (11:11) Thomas worked on the ggforce package, which aims at providing missing functionalities to ggplot2 during his internship at RStudio.
  • (13:34) Thomas recalled the best learning he got from his internship with RStudio.
  • (15:08) Thomas gave advice for people who want to contribute to open-source projects.
  • (18:57) Thomas shared the experience working on the package ggraph, also known as the grammar of graphics for relational data.
  • (22:02) Thomas discussed 2 other packages, tidygraph and particles, that he built to bring graph and network data into the tidyverse, the very popular collection of R packages designed for data science.
  • (25:37) Thomas provided resources for R users who want to learn more about network analysis and network visualization.
  • (27:05) Thomas went over his job as a data scientist at SKAT, where he handled all the advanced analytics going on in the Danish Tax Authorities.
  • (32:15) Thomas talked about the intuition behind working on patchwork, a package that can combine multiple ggplots in the same graphics.
  • (35:50) Thomas summarized his most recent projects, gganimate (a package that extends ggplot2 to include the description of animation) and tweenr (a package for interpolating data mainly for animations).
  • (40:47) Thomas discussed his current job as a software engineer at RStudio.
  • (43:04) Thomas gave his two cent on the Python and R comparison.
  • (45:53) Thomas talked about using Twitter to share his work, where he has more than 10,000 followers.
  • (47:07) Thomas went over something he works on during his spare time, generative art visualization (check his Instagram account!).
  • (49:09) Thomas gave some thoughts on the tech community in Copenhagen.
  • (51:09) Closing segments.

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