Since I first started learning R, I’ve got two new jobs which have both involved using the language every day. In a sense, almost everything I’ve done at work over the past few years can be directly attributed to skills I’ve learned from reading books.
However, I have a few specific examples of where skills I’ve learnt from reading books have helped me to generate impact. Back when I was working at the Intergenerational Foundation (IF) I worked europe rcs data on a project where I wanted to use the Energy Performance Certificates open database – a 20GB open dataset – to measure the number of new-build properties which had been built over the previous ten years in every English local authority area and which were had less than 30 square metres of floorspace.
This presented me with a difficulty: I wanted to do the analysis using R. However, one of the limitations of R is that you have to store the data you are analysing in memory, and the size of the datasets you can hold in memory is limited by the amount of RAM your computer has. Because of this limitation I couldn’t actually import the whole dataset into the same R session at once in order to analyse it.