About Me
I am newly retired and eagerly exploring my next chapter! You can follow along in this journey at My Next Chapter blog.
Previously, I was a journalist and data professional equally at home analyzing data, coding tools for journalists, and covering technology. My most recent paid job was director of editorial data & analytics at Foundry (an IDG Inc. company), which publishes tech Web sites including Computerworld, CIO, PCWorld, and Macworld. I was also author and host of InfoWorld's Do More With R series. I still occasionally freelance for Computerworld and InfoWorld.
My book, Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism, is available from publisher CRC Press and Amazon (you can see Six chapters free online).
I've taught workshops for ProPublica, the New England First Amendment Coalition, and at Investigative Reporters and Editors conferences. And, I keynoted the 2020 European R User Meeting.
I received an ASBPE national gold award for impact/investigative online excellence (see story), a 2023 Neal Award for best instructional content, and two ASBPE national golds for best how-to articles (see 2014 and 2017 winners). I was also named the Digital Analytics Association's top practitioner in 2021.
I hold an Extra-class ham radio license and was honored by the Association of Radio Amateurs of Bosnia & Herzegovina "for extraordinary contribution to transmitting humanitarian messages of the citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina" during the 1992-95 war.
My other hobbies include photography, travel, hiking, snowshoeing, crocheting, and classical piano. And, I'm somewhat obsessed with both generative AI and the R programming language.
You can follow me on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/smachlis.bsky.social, Mastodon at @smach@masto.machlis.com and my searchable app with my Mastodon posts, and on LinkedIn.
My Recent InfoWorld and Computerworld Articles
Analyze text using natural language with Claude for Google Sheets 2024-12-17
Create searchable Bluesky bookmarks with R 2024-12-09
FAQ: Getting started with Bluesky 2024-12-09
Shiny for Python adds chat component for generative AI chatbots 2024-07-23
Maker of RStudio launches new R and Python IDE 2024-06-24
5 easy ways to run an LLM locally 2024-03-28
How to run R in Visual Studio Code 2024-02-15
Posit lays off R Markdown, knitr creator Yihui Xie 2024-01-05
8 ChatGPT tools for R programming 2023-12-21
Anthropic's Claude 2.1 LLM turbocharges performance, offers beta tool use 2023-11-21
My Data-Related Mastodon Posts
Reminder: The useR! @useR_conf conference is having a free virtual event August 1, a week before the in-person one. Registration still open! #RStats
https://user2025.r-project.org/register (2025-07-06 14:27:28.855) >>
This is an interesting multi-step approach for using a chatbot (not agent) to write code. While it feels like overkill for most of my little projects, it's still critical to think through the instructions and context you give an LLM - whatever steps you use!
https://almosttimely.substack.com/p/almost-timely-news-my-biggest-generative
#GenAI (2025-07-03 18:29:09.855) >>
The validate #RStats 📦 "makes it super-easy to check whether data lives up to expectations you have based on domain knowledge. It works by allowing you to define data validation rules independent of the code or data set."
Example:
check_that(iris, Sepal.Width < 0.5*Sepal.Length) |> summary()
By @markvanderloo & Edwin de Jonge
https://github.com/data-cleaning/validate (2025-07-02 13:36:54.597) >>
@keefeglise Claude Opus can be pretty good at writing R code for APIs. I don't know if this works at all for you? (I basically just copied some of the API documentation and asked it to write R code to access info for that API. It looks like it returns something, but I don't know if it's what you want, and I need to go deal with dinner 😅 ) https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/e5c482c1-e165-4c9c-a7e3-5edd92b5aa25 (2025-07-01 21:23:18.68) >>