About Me
Hi, I’m Nic. I have a PhD in Statistics and have been working in R for 15 years.
As a data scientist and self-taught developer, I spent years feeling like I wasn’t technical enough to understand a lot of software engineering concepts - until I realised it wasn’t me; it was the content and how it was explained. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve gone from “this is impossible” to “oh, I just needed someone to explain it properly.”
That’s what I try to do for others - make complex stuff accessible.
Experience
I’ve worked across pharma, public health, academia, and startups - on everything from teaching hundreds of new programmers how to work with R, to maintaining popular open source packages, to deploying R code in production environments where scalability matters.
I’ve built dashboards and internal tools supporting hundreds of concurrent users deployed across the NHS, and developed and led sold-out workshops at major R conferences including EARL and posit::conf.
Teaching
I’ve taught thousands of people through online courses, conference workshops, and private training. Topics I teach include:
- Big Data in R with Arrow and Parquet
- LLMs and AI tools in R
- CI/CD and deployment
- R package development
See my upcoming workshops or get in touch about private training for your team.
Open Source & Writing
I’m one of the core maintainers of the Apache Arrow R project, where I’ve served as package maintainer and contributed extensively to dplyr support for Arrow.
In 2024, I co-authored Scaling Up with R and Arrow, published by CRC Press.