Thomas Zwagerman
R Developer
Hello there!
My name is Thomas Zwagerman. I’m a Research Software Engineer at the British Antarctic Survey.
I have previously worked as an Environmental Data Scientist and as a Spatial Data Analyst at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, where I developed tools and processes for the automated processing and quality assurance of air quality and climate change datasets, as well as developed interactive dissemination tools and reports for customers and stakeholders. I have also worked as a Data Intelligence Officer at the Suffolk County Council, where I maintained the SCC Planning organisation on Github.
I have a BSc in Ecological & Environmental Sciences from the University of Edinburgh. I wrote my dissertation on vegetation change impact on arctic land-atmosphere interactions and snowmelt in the Arctic, and coded with a mix of Python and R. I was awarded the J.A. More Memorial Prize for best dissertation on a plant or crop topic.
R Experience
In R I have the follow experience:
Shiny Development, using the golem framework to develop applications as a package, writing modules for scalable applications and writing unit tests with shinytest2.
Automating workflows using RStudio Connect and pins (I am a contributor on the pins package).
Writing scientific and technical documents in distill and quarto.
Spatial Data manipulation and visualisation with sf, terra, leaflet and other relevant packages.
Resources I use
My first stepts in R were at the Coding Club.
Currently my favourite R books are Mastering Shiny by Hadley Wickham and Efficient R programming by Colin Gillespie and Robin Lovelace.
When I worked as a Spatial Data Analyst, I learned most of my spatial R from Geocomputation with R by Robin Lovelace.
I previously taught as an instructor on Transforming Environmental Data in R.