About Me
NEW: I'm running a 2-hour Workshop for Ukraine to help raise money for Ukraine's defense! You can donate whether or not you want to attend.
I am (mostly) retired and eagerly exploring my next chapter! You can follow along in this journey at My Next Chapter blog.
I spent most of my career as a journalist. My final full-time post was a hybrid job combining data analysis with some writing -- my official title 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
How to create your own RAG applications in R 2025-07-17
GenAI tools for R: New tools to make R programming easier 2025-03-25
3 of the best LLM integration tools for R 2025-03-11
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
My Data-Related Mastodon Posts
Weekend project: New actionsMonitoR #RStats 📦 gets all the GitHub workflows in your GitHub account (authorized by PAT) and can display them in a searchable table
https://github.com/smach/actionsMonitoR
Written almost 💯by Google Gemini 2.5 Pro - I wanted to test out Gemini on writing R code. It did quite well except for writing tests, when it went a bit off the rails.
#GenAI
[There's also a repo name column not in image] (2025-08-16 22:40:53.014) >>
@mpanhans Hope it's worth adding to your toolkit! I'm always on the lookout for interesting R table tools. (2025-08-13 02:47:08.721) >>
The {huxtable} #RStats 📦 is for “creating text tables. It is powerful, but easy to use. Huxtable’s features include:
* Export to LaTeX, HTML, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Powerpoint, RTF and Markdown
* Easy integration with knitr and rmarkdown documents”
By David Hugh-Jones. On CRAN.
https://hughjonesd.github.io/huxtable/huxtable-html.html (2025-08-13 02:20:46.969) >>
1 month to go until my Workshop for Ukraine to raise money for medics saving lives in #Ukraine! You can sign up for $20 / € 20 and learn about querying documents in R with the {ragnar} #RStats 📦 - or donate for a student to attend. Tx for considering!!11 Sept 12-2 EDT
https://www.machlis.com/workshop/ (2025-08-11 12:18:20.425) >>