Humans

tidymodels: Adventures in Rewriting a Modeling Pipeline - posit::conf(2023)

Presented by Ryan Timpe

An overview of the benefits unlocked on our data science team by adopting tidymodels.

Data science sure has changed over the past few years! Everyone’s talking about production. RStudio is now Posit. Models are now tidy.

This talk is about embracing that change and updating existing models using the tidymodels framework. I recently completed this change, letting go of our in-production code and revisioning it with tidymodels. My team ended up with a faster, more scalable pipeline that enabled us to better automate our workflow and increase our scale while improving our stakeholders’ experiences.

I’ll share tips and tricks for adopting the tidymodels framework in existing products, best practices for learning and upskilling teams, and advice for using tidymodel packages to build more accessible data science tools.

Small Package, Broad Impact: How I Discovered the Ultimate New Hire Hack - posit::conf(2023)

Presented by Trang Le

Onboarding new hires can be a challenging process, but taking a problem-focused approach can make it more meaningful and rewarding. In this talk, I will share how I discovered the ultimate new hire hack by creating two small packages that gave me the confidence I needed when I started at BMS. Through building these packages, I not only learned R things like using bslib and making font files available for published dashboards, but also gained a deep understanding of my company’s internal systems and workflows, and connected with my team via lots of questions. The resulting packages are still heavily used today.

Join me to discover how small packages can have a broad impact and what hiring managers can do to help.

Democratizing Access to Education Data - posit::conf(2023)

Presented by Erika Tyagi

Learn how the Urban Institute is making high-quality data more accessible through the Education Data Portal.

Every year, government agencies release large amounts of data on schools and colleges, but this information is scattered across various websites and is often difficult to use. To make these data more accessible, the Urban Institute built the Education Data Portal, a freely available one-stop shop for harmonized data and metadata for nearly all major federal education datasets. In this talk, we’ll demonstrate how the portal works and share lessons we’ve learned about making data accessible to users with varying technical skills and preferred programming languages.