January Recap
Our January meetup marked an important event in R-Ladies Philly history - our first ‘birthday’! We honored this occasion by celebrating what our community has achieved over the past year, and planning for an exciting 2019.
Recap of our first year
Alice and Karla started off by reiterating the founding principles of R-Ladies Philly: to create a welcoming, accepting, and representative community for R users in the Philadelphia area who espouse our values of diversity and gender equity. In doing so, R-Ladies Philly hosts free, monthly events aimed at supporting the development of our community members’ skills in R while encouraging a positive networking environment.
Over 2018, we hosted 11 skills-based events with topics ranging from ‘Introduction to Text Mining in R’ to ‘Spatial Data Basics,’ and 3 networking events to facilitate collaboration with our friends at Women in Kaggle Philly and the NWCT Philly (huge shout out to our amazing Community Chair, Karla!).
In true R-Ladies Philly fashion, Alice and Karla amassed and visualized survey data demonstrating what our members appreciate about our meetups: 
Based on these results, it seems we are on-track with our founding principles: our members most appreciate the opportunity to “learn new skills” in “a collaborative atmosphere!”
Our BiRthday Cake
This cake warrants a blog post section of its own. As evidence of our members’ multifaceted talents, Karla made a beautiful birthday cake for R-Ladies Philly. 
We at R-Ladies Philly do not judge on appearance, which necessitated a thorough evaluation of cake texture and flavor. The cake was blueberry-studded and featured a buttery, crumby texture, and was complemented by a decadent vanilla cream-cheese frosting. Based on extensive repeated-measures testing (by yours truly), we found that this cake and frosting combination achieved an approval rating of 100% (temporal autocorrelation was accounted for in a linear mixed-effects model including subject and timepoint as random effects).
A look forward to 2019
In addition to recapping the previous year, we looked ahead to 2019 by each stating our New Year’s “R”esolutions. Through this, we discovered common interests (making a package! writing an academic paper in .Rmd!) and gained insight into what topics would best serve our community in 2019. Over the next few months, we will work on these skills through a collaborative project with Philly’s largest no-kill shelter, PAWS.
Thank you
Many thanks to YOU, our incredible R-Ladies Philly members!
Thanks to WeWork for hosting us!
Resources
- Our presentation
This post was authored by Katerina Placek. For more information contact philly@rladies.org
