Last week, I participated in the Uncoast Unconference, which was a great opportunity to catch up with some old colleagues, meet a bunch of new people, and collaborate on some interesting projects.
The way these unconferences work, if you’re not familiar (I wasn’t, it was my first), is that people get together and decide on some project to work on (which can, hopefully, be finished in two days). Experience levels range from complete beginners to R Core contributors.
My group worked on adding to a package built at a previous R unconference which wrapped a couple functions in the OpenCV library in R. We didn’t get as much done as we’d hoped, but it was kind of helpful in getting started toward solving some image registration problems. Frankly, the annoying aspects of linking to external objects made it seem like just working in C/C++ or Python (which has nice automatically generated wrappers for OpenCV functions) is more convenient. However,
for those who don’t know how to program in C/C++ or Python, R wrappers would be nice:
the real benefit would come from finding a way to automatically generate these wrappers
just as in the case of Python. Or use reticulate to wrap the Python.
Other groups worked on some other useful problems. Anyway, if you have a chance to go to a similar unconference, I recommend it if you’re interested in becoming a better R developer and making new friends.