Review: The first CaRdiff R User Group meeting

Last night was the first Cardiff R User Group event. There were 6 people registered out of 24 CaRdiffians. In the end we had 8 people show up – so a whopping third of our current membership base.

As we sat around the booth eating chips and drinking beer, we covered our experiences learning R to date, the trials and tribulations of our jobs and why you shouldn’t drop a barbell on your nose. We had great discussions and most of us came away with new R functionality to look at!

We decided to initially go with the three session formats I’d proposed and see how things go:

  • TalkRs: evening events with talks and socialising
  • LearnRs: after work sessions focused on learning some new bit of R
  • LunchRs: quick lunchtime sessions to talk through a problem with someone else and hopefully solve it!

With the TalkRs sessions, we had some solid ideas around topics like shiny, integrating into javascript, time series analysis and so forth. I can see that we’ll need to typically have a beginner oriented session and an intermediate/advanced session to balance the different levels of knowledge both in terms of r usage but also the areas of R usage.

The LearnRs promise to be heavily attended, and we’ll need some helpful folks who know their stuff to help the others learn.

All in all it was very positive, although I a bit angry with myself when I didn’t capture the moment with a pic! I look forward to our next meeting.

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