I moved to Morgantown, WV in the fall of 2010. With two partners, I started Agile Monks, a software development company. We shipped a couple minor OS X utilities, three iOS apps, and did some consulting work. We finally shut it down in 2016, though it was actually dead well before that.

The reason I moved, however, was to take a job in the West Virginia University Statistics department (which offered great healthcare). Most of my time was spent working on a project called Rc²: R Cloud Computing . It was a client/server system for using R without having to know anything about setting up the server portion. The interface was designed like consumer software, not something designed by experts/academics for their own use. It was available for both macOS and iOS. It included collaboration features that allowed an entire classroom to use it, including automatic handling of assignments.

Over five years it went through a lot of transformations using a plethora of languages: Ruby, Objective-C, Java, C, C++, SQL, R, SAS, HTML/CSS, JavaScript. We released it as open source. Due to intra-departmental issues, my position was eliminated at the end of 2015.

Since then, I’ve continued working on a fork of the project with outside funding. We are gearing up for a release later this year. It is all available on github. First will be a macOS application that gives a simple, but powerful, way to work with R, all running on your local machine via Docker. With zero setup.

I’ve been consumed with health problems for the last dozen years, but I’m very enthusiastic to see this project ship as a commercial application. I’ll be blogging regularly about topics that have come up while working on Rc².