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; and author of InfoWorld's Do More With R series .

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 at ProPublica, and Investigative Reporters and Editors conferences and keynoted the 2020 European R User Meeting.

I 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) I was also named the Digital Analytics Association's top practitioner in 2021 for work analyzing data at my job and in my community I was also winner of a 2023 Neal Award for best instructional content.

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 Mastodon at @smach@masto.machlis.com and my searchable app with my Mastodon posts, as well as on LinkedIn.

My Recent InfoWorld and Computerworld Articles

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

Another resource for regular expressions in R: A Shiny app by Adam Spannbauer

App: https://spannbaueradam.shinyapps.io/r_regex_tester/

Blog post: https://adamspannbauer.github.io/2018/01/16/r-regex-tester-shiny-app/

Code: https://github.com/AdamSpannbauer/r_regex_tester_app

#RStats #RegExp #RegEx #RStudio (2024-11-20 20:13:52)  >>

Need help with regular expressions in R? Check out the RegExplain RStudio add-in by @grrrck
https://www.garrickadenbuie.com/project/regexplain/

#RStats #RegExp #RegEx #RStudio (2024-11-20 20:07:09)  >>

Learn how to make everything from basic line graphs to racing bar charts — all interactive and easily animated — with the {echarts4r} #RStats 📦- one of my faves!

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2262502/plot-in-r-with-echarts4r.html

(I just checked the code, and it still works! Even tho from 2021. Just a couple of code format issues from a recent #InfoWorld site redesign) (2024-11-20 19:39:34)  >>

“Bython is Python with braces. Because Python is awesome, but whitespace is awful.” 🤣
https://pypi.org/project/Bython/

Via the InfoWorld article “14 great preprocessors for developers who love to code” https://www.infoworld.com/article/3583482/14-preprocessors-for-programmers-who-love-to-code.html (2024-11-20 13:31:28)  >>