satRday Cape Town

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Almost a full month has passed since satRday Cape Town. Time races on (as always) bringing plenty of challenges and opportunities with each new day, but part of me wants to go back and re-live the experience, just to have some more time to take it all in again.

It’s an event which I hope will remain firmly ensconced in my memory for many years to come. I met many amazing individuals and made a whole lot of new friends. It was a fantastic time. As a result, I figured it would be a good idea to thank some of the people who made it possible.

Right at the outset, I think it’s only right to give a big shoutout to Andrew: without whom, satRday would not have come to South Africa. To give you some context, I believe he first got the process started around May 2016 with a proposal to host satRday in Cape Town. Over the following nine months as things started to come together, he worked tirelessly in order to nail down all the conference details ahead of time, and also planned and executed brilliantly during the week of the conference itself. If asked, he’ll probably say the execution was mostly down to his ability to delegate but the truth is he put in most of the hours. We all owe him a debt of gratitude.

R-ladies at Boulders Beach to see some penguins @JennyBryan @SteffLocke pic.twitter.com/fe8StAIPJh
— Julia Silge (@juliasilge) February 19, 2017

To Ryan and Etienne, who helped out with a myriad of things including web design, planning and chairing sessions, manning the registration table, recording talks, and sorting out catering - thank you for all your hard work.

Also a special thanks to Katie Lennard who helped out as a teaching assistant for both days of workshops prior to speaking on Saturday.

To our wonderful keynote speakers - Julia Silge, Jenny Bryan and Steph Locke - who all travelled a long way in order to be with us: we really appreciate you and are so grateful that you were able to be there to play your part in making the conference such a success. We really value all the effort you put into your workshops and talks, and also your willingness to invest time in conversation with many of us in the midst of it all. I hope you enjoyed your time in South Africa!

To all of the speakers and to those who led tutorials - especially those of you who travelled from elsewhere in SA or even further afield in order to be here - thank you for the time and effort spent in preparation to present at satRday Cape Town. Thank you also for being flexible in dealing with the time constraints due to the packed programme!

I hope that you all got a lot out of the experience as we did. It was a treat to have such a diverse group spanning many disciplines within both industry and academia, and I think the breadth and depth of topics covered reflect a vibrant and rapidly growing R community in South Africa.

Then to the management and staff of Workshop17 for making your magnificent facility available for this conference and for looking after us while we were there - thank you!

My final thanks go to all of our sponsors for Cape Town satRday, and especially to Vantage Data for sponsoring the Data Visualisation Challenge along with post-conference drinks. This extended the opportunity for networking and was a great way to wrap things up after a jam-packed day.

There were over 200 people in attendance, with tickets sold out for both the workshops and the conference day itself. Thank you to all of you for being part of the event. I hope that like me you were rewarded by the experience, in the form of both new knowledge and fresh inspiration.

For those who weren’t able to make it, note that the workshop resources, as well as slides and videos from the talks are available via the conference website.

satRday in Cape Town

Sat, 17 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In just two months time, the second satRday will be taking place right on my doorstep, in Cape Town, South Africa. I keep telling people I am looking forward to it, but to be honest that’s really quite an understatement. I am super excited!

satRdays are SQLSaturday-inspired, community-led, one-day, regional and affordable conferences around the world to support collaboration, networking and innovation within the R community.

If you don’t know what satRdays are about, here is the back story…

In early-mid 2015, Steph Locke got conversation going around the possibility of a SQLSaturday-inspired R conference after raising the idea at EARL 2015 Boston. With fantastic support from the #rstats community, a proposal was developed and later submitted to the R Consortium in January 2016.

In March 2016, the R Consortium announced their support for satRdays, with three events to be hosted initially, and plans for additional meet-ups as the R user base grows. Multiple locations were suggested for the first three satRdays and the agreed upon strategy was to host one in Eastern Europe, one in North America, and one on another continent elsewhere in the world.

Having been involved with the project early on, Gergely Daróczi agreed to organise the first satRday in Budapest. More than 2000 people from the online community voted on where the next two satRday events should take place, and Puerto Rico and Cape Town claimed the most votes for North America and the rest of the world.

The first satRday took place in Budapest on the 3rd September 2016 and was a big success, with almost 200 people from 19 countries registering for the event. The conference delegates comprised of a good mix of R enthusiasts from both industry and academia, who were treated to high quality workshops as well as invited and contributed talks from 25 local and international speakers.

So that brings us to the present, with preparations for Cape Town satRday already well under way. The conference will take place on the 18th February 2017, and the venue is Workshop 17, located in the heart of Cape Town’s beautiful V&A Waterfront.

Keynote speakers Steph Locke, Jenny Bryan and Julia Silge will be conducting workshops on the 16th & 17th February, covering the building and validation of logistic regression models, the intersection of R, Git & Github, and the development of reactive web apps with Shiny (you can find further workshop details here).

A number of other speakers have already been confirmed, with sessions planned around topics such as R in the Sciences, R and Big Data, and Applications of R in Industry. Presentations may take the form of a workshop (90min), standard talk (20min), lighting talk (5min) or poster, and proposals can be submitted here.

Note that early-bird registration closes less than a week from now, and presentation proposals will be accepted up until 20th January 2017. Below is a summary of all the key dates relating to the conference:

Event	Date
Early-Bird Registration Deadline	2016-12-23
Workshop Submission Deadline	2017-01-20
Talk Submission Deadline	2017-01-20
Notification of Acceptance	2017-01-25
Registration Deadline	2017-02-15
Workshops	2017-02-16 / 2017-02-17
Conference	2017-02-18

All this information - and more - can be found on the website. I look forward to seeing many of you at the conference!

South Africa on Jon Calder

satRday Cape Town

satRday in Cape Town