This week my fellow data scientists and I attended a talk by the one-and-only Hadley Wickham! Hosted jointly by Statistical Programming DC and Data Science DC, Hadley spoke about creating R packages efficiently within the RStudio ecosystem.

As expected, the talk was both entertaining and educational. He introduced several aspects of package creation that I can’t wait to incorporate into my workflow. Perhaps most fascinating of all, was that we got to watch him code his talk live. Watching the (sometimes frantic) coding of an R guru was an interesting insight as well.

I was especially hyped for this talk because Hadley is a personal hero of mine. I’ve been living in the “tidyverse” (although I prefer the unofficial affectionate “hadleyverse”) for a few years now, and to meet the progenitor himself left me a little starstruck. Contrary to the “don’t meet your heroes” adage, Hadley was extremely personable and an all around awesome dude. He even let us take a picture with him!