No installation required: Instant coding demos and workshops using dev containers and WebR

Teaching or showing someone code used to involve a lot of setup: installing R, packages and other system dependencies, getting versions right, worrying about operating systems — and then you’d spend hours troubleshooting instead of teaching.

Those days are largely a thing of the past! In this talk, James will discuss two technologies in particular that make playing with R code interactively a matter of just a few clicks: development containers and WebR.

James will use examples to show just how easy it is to set up some reproducible research, a workshop or a browser-based demo that anyone can run, even if they’ve never coded before.

James Goldie is the Data and Digital Storytelling Lead with 360info, an open newswire supported by Monash University. He has a PhD in climate science from UNSW and has been coding in R since 2014.