On December 9 2008, very nearly ten years ago, the first post on Revolutions was published. Way back then, this blog was part of a young startup called Revolution Computing, which later became Revolution Analytics. (That name persists to this day in the URL of this blog.) The idea at that time was to introduce the world to a wonderful but little-known statistics environment called R, by sharing news and applications of R to the broader data analysis community, along with tips and tricks for those that had already discovered R.
Since then, this blog has seen several waves shaking up the industry, from big data to data science, predictive analytics and machine learning, cloud computing and — lately — artificial intelligence. It’s seen rising stars become leaders, new players become standards, and industry stalwarts enter the fray. And R has been there through it all.
I’d like to thank the organizers of the amazing SatRDays DC conference last weekend for allowing me to take some time at that event to reflect on the past 10 years of this blog, the R community, and how they intersected. You can see the video of the talk here, starting at the 2hr 19 minute mark. (That’s a Facebook video and they don’t support embedding, sadly.) I’ve also embedded the slides below: they don’t mean much without the talk track, but you can use them to appreciate Ashely McNamara’s gorgeous art.
Oh, and here are links to the posts mentioned:
It’s been an amazing 10 years. I’d like to thank my various managers over the years for supporting me in the blog, all of my guest bloggers and most of the commenters (but not the trolls), and especially you, dear readers, for making this all worthwhile. Blogging has been a big part of my life, and I look forward to being able to continue the tradition in the future as well.
Happy 10th birthday, Revolutions!
SatRDays DC: Afternoon Sessions videos (the Revolutions talk starts at 2:19:00)