R/Pharma 2025 Opening Remarks
Opening Remarks
Welcome everyone to another day of R/Pharma conference. I want to thank the organising committee for putting on such a fantastic event, and for inviting me to deliver these opening remarks today. When they asked me to talk this afternoon (or morning or evening, whatever time it is for you), I suddenly felt this pressure to say something profound. And it’s quite hard to actively think of something profound. But what I ended up thinking about is what do I wish I had known much earlier in my R journey?
It’s not just about what you do, it’s about how you tell people
The first thing I wish I’d known is that it’s not just about what you do it’s about how you tell people. I work as a data visualisation specialist, but my background is in statistics in an academic setting. And the idea of working full-time in data viz isn’t something that ever really occurred to me at any point in my educational pathway. But I really enjoy doing data visualisation - it’s the perfect intersection of maths, data, art, and design for me. And I really don’t think I would have figured out that it’s a thing people can do as a job, if I hadn’t fallen into that TidyTuesday. If you’re not already aware of TidyTuesday, please go and check it out. It’s a social data project that shares a new dataset every week and people are encourage to do something with it - maybe make a chart, build a shiny app, or fit a statistical model. And ideally also share the outputs and the code that built them.
And I started doing TidyTuesday in early 2021, as a way to get a bit better at R but mainly to fill the time during Covid lockdowns. But what started out as a “make a couple of charts and post them on Twitter during a national lockdown”, has essentially become my entire career. And that’s incredible, and still slightly insane to me.
But if I’d just done TidyTuesday myself and not shared the outputs, or if I’d never gotten involved it in the first place. If the only place I ever publicly shared charts I’d made were in academic papers or presentations, there’s no way I would have found my way into a data viz career. Sharing stuff you’ve done, and learning in public can definitely feel scary but you do gain a lot from it. You see how other people approach similar problems, how they write code, and also you see some really pretty charts.
And this idea of thinking about how you share and how you present your work carries over into your day to day job. Making sure the reports you write and the charts you make, are as professional looking as the work that goes into the analysis behind them. Put effort into making sure your visualisations, websites and documents are clear because it can really impact how people perceive your work. It’s so important to spend a little bit of time thinking about what you want to show and what’s the best way to show that, rather than jumping straight into code and using the default settings. As much as I love R, hearing “that doesn’t look like it was made in R” is one of the greatest compliments.
Learning through play is more fun
And talking about TidyTuesday, brings me onto the next thing I wish I’d known. And that the fact that learning through play is much more fun and, for me, much more effective. We learn by playing when we’re children but at some point when we grow up, we suddenly, or at least I used to, turn everything a check list of tasks and everything has be useful and have a point. But when you’re trying to learn something new, especially if it’s something you don’t desperately need to learn today, motivation can drop off fast. So making it fun is how you keep learning.
I’ve been asked many times, how do you manage to keep doing TidyTuesday every week. And it’s been almost five years at this point. And it’s because it doesn’t feel like a chore. It’s my fun, play with data time each week. There’s no pressure to make some perfect or useful, there’s no pressure to explore every aspect of the data in a week. It’s an opportunity to try new packages, new types of charts, and just see what happens. To play with stuff you think is cool, that it’s quite hard to shoehorn into your normal day to day work.
Don’t underestimate the value of online community
The final thing I wish I’d known is how powerful the R community is, and particularly the online community. I grew up in the era of warnings about not meeting strangers from the internet, but I recently went to the WOMBAT workshop in Australia, and the fact that I could fly 10,000 miles to a country I’d never been to before and find myself in a room full of people it felt like I’d known for ages, was amazing.
Those people you meet online through conferences, through social media, or through GitHub and StackOverflow comments, are so important. And that’s one of the reasons, I really enjoy this R/Pharma conference so much every year because it’s accessible to so many people. It runs across so multiple different time zones, and it’s completely free, there’s recordings, and people share the materials online. It brings together a really wide range of people from all different levels, backgrounds, and domains. So if you’re joining for the first time, or if you’ve mainly just listened to talks in the past, do think about interacting with the other people here. It’s not just about the cool new things you learn in workshops, and the ideas you hear about in talks, it’s really about the people you meet. So take advantage of the fact that there are lots of people interested in similar things in one online space.
I think R is a fantastic thing, but I think the R community is even more fantastic, so with that, go and enjoy another day of R/Pharma sessions!