AWS has announced support for container images for their serverless computing platform Lambda. AWS doesn’t provide an R runtime for Lambda, and this was the excuse I needed to finally try to make one.

Locking down R package dependencies and versions is a solved problem, thanks to the easy-to-use renv package. System dependencies — those Linux packages that need to be installed to make certain R packages work — are a bit harder to manage.

I’ve set myself an ambitious goal of building a Kubernetes cluster out of a couple of Raspberry Pis. This is pretty far out of my sphere of knowledge, so I have a lot to learn. I’ll be writing some posts to publish my notes and journal my experience publicly. In this post I’ll go through the basics of Kubernetes, and how I hosted a Plumber API in a Kubernetes cluster on Google Cloud Platform.

It’s no secret that I love R and begrudgingly use Python. But there’s a another option for data science, and it promises the speed of C with the ease of use of R/Python. That language is Julia, and it’s a delight to use. I took some time to learn the basics, and I’m sharing my impressions here.

drake is a package for orchestrating R workflows. Suppose I have some data in S3 that I want to pull into R through a drake plan. In this post I’ll use the S3 object’s ETag to make drake only re-download the data if it’s changed.