Posit Conf 2024 Retrospective
Brian Carter
August 23, 2024
Introduction I returned from Posit Conf 2024 and wanted to reflect on the experience. ProCogia had a really good showing
I’m a seasoned professional with a passion for all things data, having dedicated the majority of my career to its mastery. My journey led me through the realm of nonprofit cancer research, where I’ve proudly authored or coauthored over 60 peer-reviewed articles, contributing significantly to advancements in the field.
Currently, I lead a dynamic team of consultants encompassing DevOps engineers, developers, and statisticians, fostering a collaborative environment that thrives on innovation. Our client base spans diverse industries including finance, nonprofit, government, and Pharma, allowing us to bring a wealth of experience to each partnership. With a team boasting a wide variety of backgrounds and expertise, we approach every client challenge with a multifaceted perspective, ensuring tailored and effective solutions.
Project Overview:
A large market research company in North American relied exclusively on SAS for all their analytic needs. SAS is an antiquated system and they were paying millions of dollars a year for an analytic platform that was no longer meeting their needs. They wanted to migrate their data and analytics to Databricks and needed help translating the code.
Methodology:
We worked with a multidisciplinary team that IT support, database engineers, and a large team of R developers. My team developed a system for preparing SAS programs for migration, testing the outputs, and deploying the code to Databricks using the sparklyr package.
Results:
In just over 18 months, my team was able to translate several hundred-thousand lines of SAS code subsequently deployed to Databricks. The client has ended all SAS processes and is now saving $7m a year.
Project Overview
Our client is a small hospital system in California. They are too small to hire a dedicated team of data analysts, so many of their staff had tried using Rstudio to manage some patient data. This ran into privacy and data quality issues and they needed help designing and using a modern analytic platform.
Methodology:
We recommended a Posit Workbench platform so they could collaborate within a modern server environment. We configured Workbench on an AWS cloud account that is 100% managed by our consultants. We also developed a bespoke 6-week R training course based on their unique data and processes which covered everything from basic data types, writing custom functions, and incoporating AI in our code development.
Results:
The client is able to manage their patient data within a secure modern analytic system. They also have access to an example code base for exploring their data. The R training program included slide decks, exercises and quizes, and recorded trainings that can be useful as new staff are onboarded to the system.
Introduction I returned from Posit Conf 2024 and wanted to reflect on the experience. ProCogia had a really good showing
Introduction I spent most of my career as a lonely R programmer in a SAS group that was perpetually failing
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At ProCogia, we specialize in guiding teams worldwide through the transition from legacy SAS systems to modern, open-source R and
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Applied best practices in code conversion from SAS production processes to R for one of the largest market research companies
