I came across a wonderful open source project recently — Project OSRM (link) — A modern C++ routing engine for shortest paths in road networks. You can imagine it as a free version of Google Maps API, without live traffic of course. It is very valuable for my work because my current company has large shipping and logistic services. Being able to calculate the distance and directions between locations in a timely fashion will enable us to research and modeling on route optimization, leads generation, etc.
Today I am so pleased to introduce my first PyPI package (so much easier to submit comparing to CRAN) — gower for calculating gower distance. The core function is originally published by Marcelo Beckmann. There are lots of packages in R that incorporated this method but unfortunately not for Python users. I took this chance to try the whole package-making experience for PyPI and here we go!
What is gower distance?
Today I am so pleased to introduce my first CRAN package for sending formatted messages to Microsoft Teams, teamr.
Motivation is simple here. For years I have been using Slack and built many slash commands and apps using incoming webhooks with R, but ever since I started to use Teams, I found that we will have the same needs for communicating with R as well. So with some inspiration from the Python package pymsteams.
The highcharter Package The highcharter package link by Joshua Kunst has long been my favorite data visualization package in R. It created a wonderful API to the famous JS Highcharts library. link. Although Highcharts is not free for commercial use, but I found many functionality of it is unparalleled with other visualization packages like ploty or sunburstR or r2d3.
For example, you can easily create an interactive scatterplot with ggplot2 like syntax: