Josiah Parry

I make R go fast 🏎️💨

My name is Josiah (pronounced Joe-sigh-uh) and I believe R belongs in production.

I have a penchant for writing R packages that are really fast and efficient. Typically, this involves writing Rust and glueing R them together using extendr.

I also, quite specifically, like solving geospatial problems. I work at Esri doing spatial statistics and—you guessed it—writing R packages.

posts

Type safe(r) R code

Robust type checking with r-lib

r

Type safety is all the rage these days. It’s the (one of the many) reason why people love Rust , TypeScript, and Pydantic.

Read a CSV in a production API

plumber

r

prod

Deploying RESTful APIs is the way to put any language into production. R is not any different.

Static file server in R

{plumber} is (always) the answer

r

plumber

api

Plumber, ambiorix, and opencpu are the keys to putting R into production.

Caching WebR from CDN

Notes from developing webr-js-rs

webr

rust

r

I am developing Rust bindings to WebR. Because WebR is not compiled for WASI and only WebAssembly, native Rust bindings are not possible. Instead, bindings are done through w…

Evaluate strings as code

r

Prompted by a post on Mastodon, I wanted to explore how to evaluate an R string as code.

Docker: keep your secrets secret

production

docker

You’ve written a shiny app, plumber API, or an ETL process. Your orchestrating that work with Docker. In order for the application to work, you need to be able to use secret…

Making a Ridiculously Fast™ API Client

Design choices for a highly performant R package

I recently had the pleasure of publishing the R package {arcgisgeocode}. It is an R interface to the ArcGIS World Geocoder. You could say it is the “official” Esri geocoding…

IndexMap instead of BTreeMap

rust

When I am programming in Rust, I often need to use either a HashMap<K, V> or a BTreeMap<K, V>. In the case of a BTreeMap, the order is based on the key values. For example…

{duckdb} or {duckplyr}?

DuckDB and the R ecosystem

r

prod

duckdb

I’ve been diving pretty deep into DuckDB. It has shown that it has great utility for the vast majority of mid to large scale data analysis tasks—I’m talking Gigabytes not…

Spatial ML: Predicting on out-of-sample data

3 approaches to using spatially derived features

spatial

ml

The incorporation of spatially dependent variables in a machine learning model can greatly improve the model’s performance. These features can include, but not limited to:

Univariate Spatial Dimensionality Reduction

Extening PCoA and Moran Eigenvector Maps to include attributes

spatial

r

In discussing principal coordinate analysis (PCoA), the question naturally arose of “how could we incorporate non-spatial data into this method?” Well, that is what I wanted…

Encoding spatial patterns as variables

Principal Coordinate Analysis & Moran Eigenvectors

spatial

r

I’ve begun reading “Spatial modelling: a comprehensive framework for principal coordinate analysis of neighbour matrices (PCNM)” which describes the process of making “Moran…

Databases for Data Scientist

And why you probably dont need one

production

arrow

duckdb

It’s been coming up a lot recently, or, maybe, I’ve just been focused on this a lot more. Data scientists are coming to terms with the fact that they have to work with…

Why do we sleep on factors?

And how I wish things may behave?

r

Factors are R’s version of an enum(eration) (related post). They’re quite handy and I think we can probably rely on them a bit more for enumations like c("a", "b", "c").…

Shared segment of parallel lines

r-spatial

spatial

I am working on a problem where I identify approximately parallel lines. From the two lines that I have deemed parallel, I want to calculate the length of the segment that…

Leptos & wasm-bindgen

note to self: its tricksy

rust

As a side project, I’m trying to build a full stack web app with auth, session management etc. I do data science and no web-dev. I am very out of my element. But no better…

Writing S3 `head()` methods

a note to self for later

pkg-dev

I’ve been struggling for the past 15-20 minutes trying to fix the following R CMD check greivances.

Building a DataFusion CSV reader with arrow-extendr

extending R with Arrow and Rust

rust

pkg-dev

extendr

arrow

Want to skip to the end with the source code? Click here.

Enums in R: towards type safe R

r

package-dev

rust

Hadley Wickham has recently dropped a new draft section of his book Tidy Design Principles on enumerations and their use in R.

Export Python functions in R packages

r

python

package-dev

I was asked a really interesting question by @benyamindsmith yesterday. The question was essentially:

Where am I in the sky?

r

spatial

When I was flying back from the Spatial Data Science Across Langauge event from Frankfurt to Atlanta the plane I was bored beyond measure. The plane had no wifi to connect…

Spatial Data Science Across Languages

some key takeaways

r

r-spatial

spatial

I feel very fortunate to have been invited to the first Spatial Data Science Across Languages (SDSL) workshop at the University of Münster. I am even more fortunate that I…

Valve: putting R in production

rust

r

production

This blog post is based on my most recent YouTube video. Please give it a watch!

R is still fast: a salty reaction to a salty blog post

rust

r

production

There’s this new blog post making the rounds making some claims about why they won’t put R into production. Most notably they’re wheeling the whole “R is slow thing” again.…

What’s so special about `array`s?

r

I’m working on a new video about S3 objects in R and class inheritance / hierarchy. One of my favorite functions for exploring objecs and their structure is unclass().

Feeling rusty: counting characters

rust

r

I’m working on a new video for you all on GeoHashes. As I keep working on my slides and script I keep finding new things I want to explore or that I need to write. Recently…

Rust traits for R users

and how they’ll make your package better

rust

r

package-development

tutorial

In the few months that I’ve been programming in Rust nothing has so fundamentally shifted the way that I think about programming—and specifically R packages—as Rust traits.…

learning rust

rust

personal

I have been wanting to learn a low level language for quite some time. Due to the power and prominence of Rcpp I had thought I wanted to learn C++. Every fast package in R…

JHU talk (slides)

Raw strings in R

r

The one thing about Python I actually really like is the ability to use raw strings. Raw strings are super helpful for me because at work I use a windows machine. And…

Programatically Create Formulas in R

R

package-dev

I’m working on a prototype of a tool using R to create some regressions. I’d like to take in independent and dependent variables as character vectors and use those to create…

YouTube Videos & what not

Please vote or post a comment in this discuss on what would be helpful for you.

Fishnets and overlapping polygons

r

spatial

tutorial

Today a question was asked in the geocompr discord. I wanted to share part of the solution as I think it covers 2 helpful things:

Complete spatial randomness

spatial

rstats

sfdep

< this is a cliche about Tobler’s fist law and things being related in space>. Because of Tobler’s first law, spatial data tend to not follow any specific distribution. So…

spacetime representations aren’t good—yet

sfdep

rstats

spacetime

My beliefs can be summarized somewhat succinctly.

Make your R scripts Databricks notebooks

databricks

r

I’ve never had a good reason to deviate from the canonical .R file extension until today.

Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis in R

esda

sfdep

r-spatial

talk

Geospatial data is becoming increasingly common across domains and industries. Spatial data is no longer only in the hands of soil scientists, meteorologists, and…

My new IDE theme: xxEmoCandyLandxx

In general, I’m not a fan of “Dark Themes.” I find that they have too much contrast and hurt my eyes a bit. However, at night time when the lights are dim, my good ole…

Actually identifying R package System Requirements

During my approximately three years at RStudio there were two things that stumped system admins more than anything: proxied authentication and system dependencies for R…

Installing Python on my M1 in under 10 minutes

python

r

reticulate

spatial

Installing python has never been an easy task for me. I remember back in 2016 I wanted to learn how to use pyspark and thus python, I couldn’t figure out how to install…

The heck is a statistical moment??

spatial

I wrote myself a short story to help me remember what the moments are.

SLICED! a brief reflection

A few weeks ago I was a contestant on the machine learning game show #SLICED! The format of the challenge is as follows:

{cpcinema} & associated journey

talks

Yesterday I had the chance to discuss my R package, {cpcinema} with the Boston useR group. If you’re not familiar with {cpcinema}, please read my previous post. I intended…

OSINT in 7 minutes

As I was perusing the bowels of YouTube, as one does, I stumbled across a video titled “Using My Python Skills To Punish Credit Card Scammers”. The video is both whimsical…

APIs: the language agnostic love story

Moving Beyond the R & Python love story

You may have noticed by now that we at RStudio have been emphatic about the R & Python love story. This is driven by our efforts to unify data science teams and bridge the…

Python & R in production — the API way

In my previous post I discussed how we can alter the R & Python story to be predicated on APIs as a way to bridge the language divide. The R & Python love story feels almost…

Color Palette Cinema

R

Note (2022-11-14): This package no longer is functional because of changes to underlying API cpcinema calls. Thus output is no longer rendered for this blog post.

Secure R Package Environments

r-admin

security

One of the biggest challenges faced by public sector organizations and other security conscious groups is package management. These groups are typically characterized air…

What is critical race theory, anyways?

TL;DR critical race theory is a mental framework used for understanding racial inequality that focuses on power imbalances.

Demographic Change, White Fear, and Social Construction of Race

Two or three weeks ago, somewhere between Carter Dome and Mount Hight in the White Mountains of New Hampshire my friend posed a thought experiment to me. It’s one that I…

Medium Data and Production API Pipeline

Compress your JSON with gzip to increase API speed and reduce memory utilization in R

production

api

“[P]arsing huge json strings is difficult and inefficient.”¹ If you have an API that needs to receive a large amount of json, sending that over will be slow.

The Red Queen Effect

Understanding the Narrow Corridor

Social Science

It’s Monday morning. You’re back at work after a few days off. Your inbox is a lot more full than you hoped with 70 emails. Time to get reading and sending. It’s been an…

Excel in pRod

I recently had a conversation that touched on using plumber to automate the parsing of Excel documents for administering data science assets. This brings up some very…

Design Paradigms in R

Lately I have been developing a deep curiosity of the origins of the R language. I have since read a more from the WayBack Machine than a Master’s student probably should.…

R Security Concerns and 2019 CRAN downloads

R

The number of downloads that a package has can tell us a number of things. For example, how much other packages rely on it. A great case of this is rlang. Not many of use rla…

Non-interactive user tokens with googlesheets4

Deploying to RStudio Connect

This repository contains an example of an R Markdown document that uses googlesheets4 to read from a private Google Sheet and is deployed to RStudio Connect.

Finding an SPSS {haven}

How to deal with .sav files from SPSS

Note (2022-11-14): the dataset that was used can no longer be access from the url I provided in this blog post. I have found it at a zip file in a blog post at https://blog.f…

Intro to Tidy Modeling

This is a resource intended to provide a top-level introduction into the main aspects of tidymodels. The introduction into tidyverse concepts largely adapted from Thomas…

Water Quality Analysis

Resource created for training at EPA

R

tutorial

This small tutorial was developed for a talk / workshop that Phil Bowsher gave at the EPA. This serves as a quick example of using the tidyverse for spatial analysis…

∑ { my parts }

R

politics

library(tidyverse)

terrorists <- readr::read_csv("https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSqNhpFX_69klKgJCVobc3fjHYVE9pNosrDi9h6irLlCtSSLpR704iu9VqI7CxdRi0iKt3p1FD…

Web-scraping for Campaigns

R

Note: 2022-11-14 I’m migrating my website and this can no longer be reproduced. This blog post is based on the short guide I wrote back in 2019. Please see the old bookdown…

Google Trends for Campaigns

R

Over the past few years we have seen Google Trends becoming quite ubiquitous in politics. Pundits have used Google seach trends as talking points. It is not uncommon to hear…

Introducing trendyy

A tidy wrapper for gtrendsR

R

trendyy is a package for querying Google Trends. It is build around Philippe Massicotte’s package gtrendsR which accesses this data wonderfully.

genius tutorial

R

You want to start analysing song lyrics, where do you go? There have been music information retrieval papers written on the topic of programmatically extracting lyrics from…

genius Plumber API

R

Docker

Python

get started here

The Fallacy of one person, one vote

Quantifying constituency representation

politics

On October 6, 2018, the US Senate voted 50–48 in favor of the appointment of Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. This led many pundits to point out a “disconnect” between the…

The Cost of Gridlock

Shutdown Politics and Their Impact on Greater Boston

politics

Originally posted via Boston Area Research Initiative

xgboost feature importance

Extracting and plotting feature importance

R

machine learning

This post will go over extracting feature (variable) importance and creating a function for creating a ggplot object for it. I will draw on the simplicity of Chris Albon’s…

[Not so] generic functions

A simple explanation because I struggled to understand any documentation

R

tutorial

Lately I have been doing more of my spatial analysis work in R with the help of the sf package. One shapefile I was working with had some horrendously named columns, and…

US Representation: Part I

The Connecticut Compromise and it’s lasting effects

letters

Before the United States created the Constitution, something called the Articles of Confederation defined what the US Government would look like. It was the first attempt at…

Introducing: Letters to a layperson

letters

I have been in the world of academia for nearly five years now. During this time I’ve read countless scholarly journal articles that I’ve struggled to wrap my head around.…

Chunking your csv

Writing data subsets

R

tutorial

Sometimes due to limitations of software, file uploads often have a row limit. I recently encountered this while creating texting campaigns using Relay. Relay is a…

Reading Multiple csvs as 1 data frame

Reading chunked csv files

R

tutorial

In an earlier posting I wrote about having to break a single csv into multiple csvs. In other scenarios one data set maybe provided as multiple a csvs.

Coursera R-Programming: Week 2 Problems

The Tidy Approach

R

tutorial

Over the past several weeks I have been helping students, career professionals, and people of other backgrounds learn R. During this time one this has become apparent…

Introducing geniusR

R

geniusR

geniusR enables quick and easy download of song lyrics. The intent behind the package is to be able to perform text based analyses on songs in a tidy[text] format.