Reviews

Learning to code is worth it

Someone recently shared this great talk by Chris Allen from lambda conf 2017.  The title of the talk is “Why Johnny Can’t Code Good,” but the content is more about how to grow as a programmer.  His points are true whether you’re just starting out, or have been coding for years.

R/Finance 2014 Review

It’s been more than a month since R/Finance 2014, and my job has finally slowed down enough to allow me to write down my thoughts (though I’m writing this over two days during my train to and from Chicago). The comments below are based on my personal experience. If I don’t comment on a seminar or presentation, it doesn’t mean I didn’t like it or it wasn’t good; it may have been over my head or I may have been distracted with my duties as a committee member.

R/Finance 2013 Review

It’s been one week since the 5th Annual R/Finance conference, and I finally feel sufficiently recovered enough to share my thoughts. The conference is a two-day whirlwind of applied quantitative finance, fantastic networking, and general geekery. The comments below are based on my personal experience. If I don’t comment on a seminar or presentation, it doesn’t mean I didn’t like it or it wasn’t good; it may have been over my head or I may have been distracted with my duties as a committee member.

Book Review: Parallel R

You have a problem: R is single-threaded, but your code would be faster if it could simultaneously run on more than one core. You have access to a cluster and/or your computer has multiple cores. Parallel R, by Q. Ethan McCallum and Stephen Weston, can help you put this extra computing power to use. The book describes 6 approaches to distributed computing. Thoughts on each approach follow: snow The chapter starts by showing you how to create a socket cluster on a single machine (later sections discuss MPI clusters, and socket clusters of several machines).