Tools for People and Information Systems

I gave a lightning talk at Boise State University's 2017 Research Computing Days on the tools that I use in recommender systems research. This page collects resources about that.

• Talk slides (local PDF)
• 2016 State of the Tools, where I describe my use of some of these
• Remote Data Analysis with Jupyter and ngrok

Software Links

• tmux, the terminal multiplexer for managing long-running jobs (is available in Red Hat Linux, possibly through EPEL; screen is an acceptable but older alternative)

• direnv, a tool for keeping per-project settings for your command line environment

• PuTTY, the venerable Windows SSH client

• MobaXterm, a more powerful SSH, X11, and file transfer client

• WinSCP is great for getting files into and out of compute servers

• Anaconda, for installing the PyData and R stacks

• R

  • ggplot2 for unbeatable statistical graphics
  • dplyr munges data for breakfast.
  • readr is a faster CSV reader
  • The tidyverse is good stuff

• Java

• Python

• JavaScript with node.js and npm

  • Gulp for automating tasks

• Gradle for heavy-duty automation

• PostgreSQL for all your SQL and no-SQL needs

• ngrok — be extremely careful with this. The latest version of Jupyter has security support to make it secure by default, but older versions do not. Shut down tunnels as soon as you no longer need them. If you are not confident you know how to use it securely, use local SSH tunnels (PuTTY and MobaXterm both support them).