Publications by Maëlle Salmon

Are #python users more likely to get into Slytherin?

31.12.2017

This post requires some familiarity with the Harry Potter books but I’m committed to making this blog friendly to everyone, even Muggles/Nomajes. Have you seen Mark Sellors’ blog post series about writing command line utilities in R? It’s a great one but I was a bit puzzled by his using randomness to assign houses in his sorting hat example...

5514 sym R (3801 sym/6 pcs) 4 img 1 tbl

Cheer up, Black Metal Cats! Bubblegum Puppies

03.01.2018

Do you know the Black Metal Cats Twitter account? As explained in this great introduction, it “combines kitties with heavy metal lyrics”. I know the account because I follow Scott Chamberlain who retweets them a lot, which I enjoy as far as one can enjoy such a dark mood. Speaking of which, I decided to try and transform Black Metal Cat tweet...

6074 sym R (5313 sym/11 pcs) 6 img 5 tbl

Rainbowing a set of pictures

06.01.2018

I’ve now down a few collages from R using magick: the faces of #rstats Twitter, We R-Ladies with Lucy D’Agostino McGowan, and a holiday card for R-Ladies. The faces of #rstats Twitter and holiday card collages were arranged at random, while the We R-Ladies one was a mosaic forming the R-Ladies logo. I got the idea to up my collage skills by t...

6290 sym R (6894 sym/8 pcs) 6 img

Galentine’s day cards

25.01.2018

Remember the nascent series of blog posts about Parks and recreation? Well, we’re still at one post, but don’t worry, here is a new one, and I’m sure the series will eventually be a real one. I’m looking at you, my R-Ladies friends. That said, today is not a day for passive agressive hints, because I’ve decided it’s Galentine’s day ...

3679 sym R (1721 sym/3 pcs) 8 img

Combine your hex stickers with magic(k)

21.02.2018

Hex stickers remind me of Pogs, except they’re cooler because you can combine them together! Some people do that very smartly. Now when I forget how to do an #rstats analysis I can just check the back of my laptop #runconf16 pic.twitter.com/DY7UgeBzYV— David Robinson (@drob) 1 d’abril de 2016 I’ve got a pretty random hex stickers combinat...

3212 sym R (1135 sym/5 pcs) 4 img

hrbrpkgs: list Bob Rudis’ packages

03.03.2018

Recently I needed to count lines of code for a project at work work (this is an expression of the person honored in this post), and happened to discover that Bob Rudis had started an R package wrapping the Perl CLOC script. Of course! He has packages for a lot of things! And he’s always ready to help: after I asked him a question about the pack...

4131 sym R (1190 sym/4 pcs) 2 tbl

Storrrify #satRdayCapeTown 2018

23.03.2018

One week ago I was in Cape Town for the local satRday conference, where I had the honor to be one of the two keynote speakers, the other one being sports analytics extraordinaire Stephanie Kovalchik (You can read Stephanie Kovalchik’s account of the conference in this blog post). It was a fantastic experience! The event was very well organized,...

13491 sym R (857 sym/3 pcs)

Lintr Bot, lintr’s Hester egg

29.03.2018

Remember my blog post about automatic tools for improving R packages? One of these tools is Jim Hester’s lintr, a package that performs static code analysis. In my experience it mostly helps identifying too long code lines and missing space, although it’s a bit more involved than that. In any case, lintr helps you maintain good code style, an...

3681 sym R (919 sym/4 pcs) 2 img 2 tbl

Bad Stock Photos of My Job? Data Science on Pexels

05.05.2018

I couldn’t miss the fun Twitter hashtag #BadStockPhotosOfMyJob thanks to a tweet by Julia Silge and another one by Colin Fay. The latter inspired me to actually go and look for what makes a data science photo… What characterizes “data science” stock photos? My (not bad) stock photo source Pexels metadata for the win Where to find inform...

4775 sym R (2856 sym/8 pcs) 4 img