Episode 7: Building Open-Source R packages with Thomas Lin Pedersen

Show Notes:

(2:16) Thomas talked about the study of Food Science and Technology in which he focused on microbiology.
(3:15) Thomas stressed the importance of user empathy, something useful he gained from his degree.
(4:39) Thomas discussed the reason to pursue a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics at the Technical University of Denmark.
(6:10) Thomas talked in-depth about the tools he developed for his Ph.D. thesis, which are able to handle large-scale pangenome analyses using sequential data.
(9:11) Thomas talked about using the ggplot2 package for his R package “Find My Friends.”
(11:11) Thomas worked on the ggforce package, which aims at providing missing functionalities to ggplot2 during his internship at RStudio.
(13:34) Thomas recalled the best learning he got from his internship with RStudio.
(15:08) Thomas gave advice for people who want to contribute to open-source projects.
(18:57) Thomas shared the experience working on the package ggraph, also known as the grammar of graphics for relational data.
(22:02) Thomas discussed 2 other packages, tidygraph and particles, that he built to bring graph and network data into the tidyverse, the very popular collection of R packages designed for data science.
(25:37) Thomas provided resources for R users who want to learn more about network analysis and network visualization.
(27:05) Thomas went over his job as a data scientist at SKAT, where he handled all the advanced analytics going on in the Danish Tax Authorities.
(32:15) Thomas talked about the intuition behind working on patchwork, a package that can combine multiple ggplots in the same graphics.
(35:50) Thomas summarized his most recent projects, gganimate (a package that extends ggplot2 to include the description of animation) and tweenr (a package for interpolating data mainly for animations).
(40:47) Thomas discussed his current job as a software engineer at RStudio.
(43:04) Thomas gave his two cent on the Python and R comparison.
(45:53) Thomas talked about using Twitter to share his work, where he has more than 10,000 followers.
(47:07) Thomas went over something he works on during his spare time, generative art visualization (check his Instagram account!).
(49:09) Thomas gave some thoughts on the tech community in Copenhagen.
(51:09) Closing segments.

His Contact Info:

Website
Twitter
GitHub
LinkedIn

His Recommended Resources:

Hilary Parker from Stitch Fix
David Robinson from DataCamp
Unflattening Comic Book
DataCamp's Network Analysis in R
Katya Ognyanova's Network Analysis and Visualization with R and igraph

Datacast features long-form, in-depth conversations with practitioners and researchers in the data community to walk through their professional journeys and unpack the lessons learned along the way. I invite guests coming from a wide range of career paths — from scientists and analysts to founders and investors — to analyze the case for using data in the real world and extract their mental models (“the WHY and the HOW”) behind their pursuits. Hopefully, these conversations can serve as valuable tools for early-stage data professionals as they navigate their own careers in the exciting data universe.

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