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. Locking down R package dependencies and versions i......

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 basi......

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. [drake is a package f...

After I posted my efforts to use MLflow to serve a model with R, I was worried that people may think I don't like MLflow. I want to declare this: MLflow is awesome. I'll showcase its model tracking features, and how to integrate them into a `t...

There's always a need for more tidymodels examples on the Internet. Here's a simple machine learning model using the recent coffee Tidy Tuesday data set. The plot above gives the approach: I'll define...

I'm obsessed with how to structure a data science project. The time I spend worrying about project structure would be better spent on actually writing code. Here's my preferred R workflow, and a few notes on Python as well. I'm obsessed with how to structure a data science project. The time I spe......

Suppose I want a function that runs some setup code before it runs the first time. Maybe I'm using dplyr but I haven't properly declared all of my dplyr calls in my function, so I want to run library(dplyr) before the actual function is run. Or maybe I want to ins...

MLflow is a platform for the "machine learning cycle". It's a suite of tools for managing models, with tracking of hyperparameters and metrics, a registry of models, and options for serving. It's this last bit that I'm going to focus on today. MLflow ...

Machine learning models get stuck at the deployment stage all the time. This stuff is hard. Machine learning models get stuck at the deployment stage all the time. This stuff is hard.