r

Save the Date: 4th-5th October This October, Jumping Rivers will be holding our in-person Shiny in Production conference! Hosted in the centre of Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, this conference will delve into the world of {shiny} and other web based R packages. We have an excellent line up of expert speakers for you from a wide range of industries, as well as an afternoon of workshops hosted by our very own Jumping Rivers R pros.

An accessible website is more than putting content online. Making a website accessible means ensuring that it can be used by as many people as possible. Accessibility standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) help to standardise the way in which a website can interact with assistive technologies. Allowing developers to incorporate instructions into their web applications which can be interpreted by technologies such as screen readers helps to maintain a consistent user experience for all.

Introduction If you’ve ever visited any food establishment in England & Wales, you’ve probably noticed the green labels somewhere on the outside with a Food Hygiene Rating from 0-5 on it. If you haven’t, then put simply - every food establishment in England / Wales is required to have a food hygiene inspection, and on the basis of this inspection is rated on a scale of 0-5, with 5 being “crack on, enjoy your dinner”, and 0 being “hmm, maybe don’t risk it”.

You know that sinking feeling that you get when you’re months into a big project and you log in one day and nothing works? Turns out something has updated and things have been removed that you needed and now you need to spend hours-days figuring out what’s changed and your masters deadline is getting closer and … ok, apparently this took me back to a very specific event. But I’m sure most of that sounds familiar to you if you’ve ever programmed something over a longer period of time.

The daffodils are out, the sun is shining(ish), spring is in the air! And that means that it’s time to start planning for the conference season. This year we’ll be treated to a lot more in person conferences for the first time since 2020, but for those of you who either prefer the online formats, or are still a bit hesitant about attending large conferences, fear not! There are many online and hybrid conferences for you to enjoy, and we’ve included a few highlights below.

R-4.2.0 is due to be released! Another year has passed, which means an updated version of R is due to be released - R version 4.2.0. As usual there have been many changes and improvements over the last year. This blog post only picks out a tiny handful, but there are dozens of smaller changes and bug fixes that can be found in the changelog. Do you use RStudio Pro?

R version 4.0.0 was released almost two years ago. The change in the major version, 3.x.y to 4.0.0, represented significant and potentially breaking changes. For an organisation to start using these new features, everyone in the company must have access to that version; otherwise code isn’t shareable. This naturally slows down adoption. We moved our internal R projects to depend on version R 4.0.0 around twelve months ago - a few months after the release date.

In November 2021, I took part in the third edition of the 30 Day Map Challenge created by Topi Tjukanov. Participants are given a theme for each day of November, and are tasked with creating a map within that theme. Details of the challenge can be found here. My own contributions can be found on GitHub. Creating thirty maps was indeed a challenge, but over the course of the month I developed a process for approaching the problem.

In line with the continuous growth at Jumping Rivers, we are looking to expand our team of dedicated professionals working in our teams. If you are enthusiastic and keen to develop your skills in cutting edge data science or infrastructure please read on! Who are we and what do we do? Jumping Rivers is an analytics company whose passion is data and machine learning. We help our clients move from data storage to data insights.

This blog post was written by our intern Osheen Macoscar. 2020 is a year most of us would like to leave behind. But not all change is bad, and many interesting developments, especially in education, happened due to the constraints imposed by COVID. Like many other training providers, we had to pivot to online learning, which brought with it challenges but also new opportunities. This review will hopefully offer some insight into what the year looked like for our trainers and training course attendees with some key facts and figures along the way.