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.

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).