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
The {sandpaper} #RStats 📦 aims to "re-imagine" creating lesson websites for Carpentries workshops. It can "take a series of Markdown or RMarkdown files and generate a static website with the features and styling of The Carpentries lessons including customized layouts and callout blocks.
Much of its functionality "is inspired by @jennybryan 's work with the {usethis} package."
https://carpentries.github.io/sandpaper/
Not on CRAN; install via the Carpentries Universe
https://carpentries.r-universe.dev/sandpaper (2025-01-17 14:52:39) >>
I just added langfuse tracing & analysis to a #GenAI hobby project I'm working on, and IT WAS SO EASY. A few lines of Python code + a free account, and I have SO much data on what's going on - including #LLM costs, which I care about if I make it public someday.
https://langfuse.com (2025-01-15 02:49:40) >>
Via Kyle Walker: "The latest version of the {mapgl} #rstats package is now released, supporting scrollytelling-style story maps!
"Build richly interactive map stories from your R data pipelines using Mapbox
or @maplibre as your backend.
"Learn how in the new vignette:"
https://walker-data.com/mapgl/articles/story-maps.html
#RSpatial #DDJ #RShiny #GIS (2025-01-14 15:10:20) >>
The {readMDTable} #RStats 📦 "helps convert raw markdown tables from a string, file, or URL to tibbles."
If both raw markdown and HTML are available, "the main benefit of readMDTable [versus {rvest} }is that raw markdown is more lightweight that its HTML-rendered alternative, resulting in less retrieval time from the web."
By Jordan Bradford.
https://jrdnbradford.github.io/readMDTable/ (2025-01-14 15:02:10) >>