The South African version of satRday has been held annually in Cape Town since 2017 but this year the conference moved up to the beautiful Discovery Head Office in Sandton, Johannesburg.  Taking place on the first week of April, the conference was held over two days with the main event being preceded by a full day of workshops presented by the keynote speakers, Omayma Said, a freelance data scientist based in Egypt, and Danielle Navarro, a computational cognitive scientist from the University of New South Wales. 

Omayma Said’s workshop was on Building Web Applications in Shiny and she wrote about her experiences presenting the workshop on her blog, Once Upon a Data and the material can be found on her GitHub page. 

Danielle was to present on Data Visualisation in R but unfortunately, she fell ill and was unable to present.  Thankfully, Andrew Collier and Jon Calder from the organising committee were able to step up and present the incredible workshop materials on her behalf. 

In addition to the keynote speakers, satRday saw a combination of 5-minute lightning talks and 20-minute standard talks from the likes of Exegetic Analytics, OfferZen, Cloudera, and none other than Chalcid’s very own Eckhard Briedenhann and Robert Bennetto.

For those of you who missed out this year, all talks were recorded and can be viewed on the satRday South Africa YouTube channel. 

 Be sure to follow the satRday South Africa Twitter account to find out the details on the 2020 satRday as well as all other R-related events happening in South Africa. 

Written by: Gemma Dawson