About Sharon Machlis
Sharon is an award-winning journalist and data analyst who is equally at home analyzing data, coding tools for journalists, and covering technology. She is currently director of editorial data & analytics at Foundry (an IDG Inc. company), which publishes tech Web sites including Computerworld, CIO, PCWorld, and Macworld; and author of InfoWorld's Do More With R series .
Her book, Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism, is available from publisher CRC Press and Amazon (you can see Six chapters free online).
Sharon is well known in the R community. She has taught workshops at ProPublica, and Investigative Reporters and Editors conferences and keynoted the 2020 European R User Meeting.
Sharon received an ASBPE national gold award for impact/investigative online excellence (see story) and two ASBPE national golds for best how-to article (see 2014 and 2017 winners) She was also named the Digital Analytics Association's top practitioner in 2021 for her work analyzing data at her job and in her community.
Sharon holds 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.
Sharon's other hobbies include photography, travel, hiking, snowshoeing, crocheting, and classical piano. And, she's somewhat obsessed with both generative AI and the R programming language.
You can follow Sharon on Mastodon at @smach@masto.machlis.com and her searchable app with her Mastodon posts, as well as on LinkedIn. (She is not currently active on Twitter, but you can see her prior tweets at @sharon000.)
Sharon's Recent InfoWorld and Computerworld Articles
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
Anthropic's Claude 2.1 LLM turbocharges performance, offers beta tool use 2023-11-21
Sharon's Data-Related Mastodon Posts
@Posit Thank you. I have seen that, it was out of date when I tried to use it a few months ago but looks like it may have been updated since then. Will take another look!
Meanwhile I'm now running Python code from R Shiny apps and deploying with Docker because I don't see how I can run that in Shinyapps.io. I’m more familiar with R shiny for things like spinners while awaiting output since it's not streaming. Or I just using another simple framework like Chainlit for now. (2024-04-26 18:04:22) >>
@Posit I'd love to see a chatbot template in that Shiny Python template gallery. (2024-04-25 23:33:24) >>
@schochastics @jmcastagnetto @rstats @chainsawriot In my R book for journalists (Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism), I decided to start off with "here are some super cool things you can do with very little code!" to get people enthusiastic and engaged. In general, I like to start with well formatted data, making very clear to people that this is unlikely to be what they encounter in the real world. I like to ease into it, but I 💯 admit that other approaches are valid 2/2 (2024-04-25 19:00:15) >>
@jmcastagnetto @chainsawriot @schochastics That goes to a question we have to consider in data journalism training too. Do you start off giving reporters perfectly formed data so they can learn coding basics, saving the unpleasant surprise of what real-world data looks like until later? Or do you start off with data wrangling nightmares right away so they know what they're getting into, but potentially turn them off to the whole field? 1/2 (2024-04-25 18:56:43) >>