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“Failure is not an option…. Either I am winning or I am learning, never failing!" - Nelson Mandela We are excited to bring aboard our newest HoH Fellow, Cornelius “Neil" Young. Neil will serve as a Project Manager for CANA and is a highly regarded U.S. Air Force leader with more than 23 years of proven success in healthcare operations, strategic leadership, management, and planning. Neil has experience and expertise spanning all facets of healthcare delivery and program management, to include training, fiscal year budgeting, and the deployment of healthcare assets to support contingency operations. Neil holds a bachelor’s degree in business and an MBA with a specialization in healthcare administration from St. Leo University. You can contact Neil at cyoung@canallc.com. Pictured From Left to Right: Rob Cranston (CANA President, COO), Jason Fincher (CANA Principal Logistics Analyst), and Neil Young (Hiring our Heroes Veteran Fellow). #teamCANA #CANAAdvisors #CANAConnect CANA Advisors is a veteran-owned, woman-owned, equal opportunity company based out of Gainesville, Virginia in the United States of America.

In this post, I take a look at bicycle traffic patterns in Seattle, Washington, in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Also, given very recent events and the timing of this article’s publication, I take the opportunity to include updated data for June, which presents bicycle traffic patterns affected by the recent social protests in addition to the pandemic. The data supporting this analysis was sourced from the Seattle Department of Transportation Bike Counters webpage, which registers daily bicycle traffic at 12 locations throughout the city. The original analysis was inspired by an R for Data Science Tidy Tuesday community event on GitHub; I highly recommend checking out the Tidy Tuesday repository for interesting, quick, data challenges. Seattle Bike Traffic Overview First, let’s take a look at an overview of tracked Seattle bike traffic over time. A few high-volume crossings (e.g., BGT North of NE 70th and the Elliot Bay Trail) stand out as well as some gaps in the bike counter data. We lost access to the X39th Ave NE Greenway counter in mid-2018 with no visible return. There is also clear seasonality to this data, as might be expected given Seattle’s rainy winters. Using NOAA weather files for the area, we can take a quick look at the relationship between the number of bicyclists on the road and area precipitation. We consider a “rainy” day to be one with at least 0.5 inches of precipitation. We can see a relationship between precipitation and bike count as well as a relationship between temperature and bike count. Bicyclist counts are noticeably higher on sunny, dry days than cold, wet ones. In Seattle, rainy day bicyclists are likely regular commuters. Next, let’s look into the hourly bike traffic patterns at different crossings to get a sense of their usage. Note: This graphic was inspired by a live screencast by David Robinson. Check out his YouTube channel for more Tidy Tuesday analyses. Many bike crossings show clear commuter patterns on the weekdays, with ridership hitting its highest counts around 9 am and again at 5 pm on Monday through Friday. For most crossing locations, weekend traffic peaks around noon. COVID-19 and Bike Traffic Seattle was the first major U.S. city to be affected by COVID-19 starting in February, 2020. How have the imposed social distancing practices impacted overall transportation trends over the past months? First, let’s look at the overall growth in COVID -19 cases compared to daily bike traffic. With pandemic isolation practices in place, there appears to be a cyclist traffic peak in April and early May. In late May and June, we start to see a decrease in these cyclists as businesses begin to reopen. How, then, has the pandemic impacted commuter patterns? As the pandemic worsens, we see a loss of commuting structure to the bicyclists’ movements over the course of the day. By April, the transportation pattern differs significantly from previous years, with counts peaking in the afternoon. Finally, let’s look at these cycling patterns broken out by counter location for the month of April, in comparison with average April ridership patterns from 2014 through 2019. These quick snapshots of Seattle’s bike lane traffic show a changing picture of transportation in the midst of a pandemic. As social distancing practices make public transit or ride-hailing inadvisable modes of transportation, many people turn to biking for both necessary transportation and leisure activity. Local Social Protest Activities and Bike Traffic Seattle was also the site of some of the nation's largest organized social protests in response to the May 25th death of George Floyd. Notably, the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) created and occupied an autonomous zone for several weeks in June within Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. One of the bike counters we studied in this analysis, the Broadway Cycle Track N of E Union Street, is located on the edge of this zone, providing a unique look at movement during this time. As the community responds after the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, we see a sharp drop in cyclist movement near this counter. When the autonomous zone is established on June 8, 2020, movement falls close to zero. Unfortunately, we can’t see the full picture with regards to pedestrian data at this location and time. However, the bike data shows a clear change in movement patterns and gives an indication of the major impacts of this event. In Summary Events of the past several months have been unprecedented in scale and scope, with tangible effects on the micro- and macro- level. Changes at each level may provide valuable insight into the impact of events throughout the world. How have COVID-19 and social protests impacted transportation patterns in your neighborhood? Have you seen follow on effects outside your community? Share your comments below or in the CANA Forum. Lucia Darrow is an Operations Research Analyst at CANA Advisors. If you would like to learn more about Lucia and CANA Advisors’ upcoming courses in analytics or the CANA Foundation, please contact her at ldarrow@canallc.com

“What’s next?” was the ultimate question I heard last year when I graduated from college. It is a daunting one. Now, some of you may have jobs lined up, plans to travel the world, or maybe you have no clue what is next. That is perfectly okay. We all want to rush into independence, rely upon ourselves, and make money; but I have learned this - now is the time to really find out about yourself and what you need in life. Some of you may have come to this article because you are looking for what is next as a data analyst. How are you going to make your way in the world of analytics? Is it right for you? There are a lot of unknowns, but one of our CANA team members and Director of Analytics Capabilities, Walt DeGrange, is here to help. He broke down the life of typical day as an analyst to give you insights into what this job entails: Research - 10% Keeping up with the art of the possible is a required daily chore. New methods and technologies are being introduced daily. Assuming a software math solution implemented six months ago is still state-of-the-art is risking irrelevance. Coding - 30% This is the basic skill required for all analytics professionals. As important as the carpenter's tools, coding in various languages such as R, Python, C++, and SAS allows the analytics professional to manipulate and gain insight from data sets. Communication - 25% Communicating with collaborators, clients, project leads, and technical experts is critical to ensure that deliverables are on time and fulfill the requirement. Marketing - 15% Everyone needs to sell. Even the coder that never presents to a client must convince their project lead that their methodology works. This is a very important skill for analytics professionals since many models use math that is not easily understood or explained. These "black box" solutions require a higher level of convincing. Project Management - 10% Keeping analytics projects on track is not like managing a construction project. There are many analysis areas that require familiarization with the data before building a model. Many aspects of model building are more of an art form than a science and thus the time to complete may have a large variation from project to project. One must consider this in the planning and execution of these projects. Breaks - 10% Everyone needs a break, and this is especially true if your job keeps you in front of a computer screen. Walking, running, and cycling gives you time and space to think about challenges. Sometimes your subconscious mind needs this distraction to develop solutions. Plus, the physical exercise is just good for you. Walt sums it up this way: “Of course, this is just a sample day. Why I love analytics is that I can apply the techniques across many industries and solve a multitude of challenges. This results in schedule variation every day.” I know each of you will enjoy the challenges and excitement of your chosen field, whether in data analytics or elsewhere. You have earned your college degree, and we here at CANA applaud you! Congratulations!

To our friends, colleagues, and partners - Words feel inadequate to describe the COVID-19 pandemic moment that has encircled our world, our communities, and our lives. On behalf of the CANA Advisors team, we wish you and your families health, safety, and optimism during this uncertain time. We are a resilient human race, and we shall prevail.   Yet, even during a time of national and world-wide crisis, silver linings trickle through. Working from home, now fondly hash tagged #WFH, has sprouted – nigh, it has vaulted – into our every day lexicon. For many, this new normal of working remotely has challenged them in good and not-so-good ways. Here, at CANA Advisors, we have been working remotely, or as we like to dub “virtually,” since our inception over ten years ago. Headquartered out of the Northern Virginia area, our team works virtually throughout the United States from San Diego, California to Hollis, Maine down to Albany, Georgia and back to Denver, Colorado!   This quarterly issue has proven timely as we share CANA perspectives and professional development activities demonstrating the strengths and opportunities found in working “virtually.” We also highlight one of our incredible CANA team members – Ms. Kaitlyn Wark – a professional Data Scientist with young children, who is owning this #WFH moment.   Finally, we want to take a moment to thank our country’s first line responders – doctors, nurses, aides, hospital administrators, police men & women, fire fighters, paramedics and every person stepping up to assist when needed – as well as our logistics backbone – the truck drivers, the railway conductors, the postal service, our third party logistics carriers, and every person who is stepping up to ensure much needed supplies and resources get to where they need to go. We salute you! ~Team CANA Reflections on rstudio::conf 2020 RStudio February 2020 by Lucia Darrow This January, several team members from CANA Advisors attended the RStudio Conference, both in person in San Francisco and remotely! At CANA, the R language is a part of our daily analytics practice, from quick turn analyses to high impact applications built in R Shiny. The RStudio Conference provides a great opportunity to learn about the latest trends in the language and connect with others in the community. Here are a few takeaways from CANA Senior Operations Research Analyst, Lucia Darrow, who attended the conference in San Francisco: Virtual Attendance  As a fully remote team, CANA Advisors is accustomed to making the most of virtual meetings and seminars to share knowledge and build community. This conference was the first time several teammates attended talks online simultaneously, coordinating to make sure we covered all the topic areas of interest. The conference organizers allowed virtual attendees to ask questions in the main queue and participate with talks as if they were in the room. It was awesome to feel as if the other R users on our team were attending the conference with me, catching the talks I wasn’t able to attend! In light of the postponement or virtual transition of many conferences scheduled for spring and summer 2020 due to COVID-19, creating the capability to attend and engage with virtual events becomes even more important. Trends and Best Practices Two trends that seemed to be of growing interest amongst intermediate and advanced users are custom R packages and taking R into production. With a slew of new tools and packages to make package creation easier, the use of internal or project specific packages has increased drastically. Formalization of shiny applications into production grade apps was a continuing theme this year. New packages like golem show promise in making this process more attainable for R programmers lacking traditional web experience.  At CANA, we are always looking for best practices to improve our R products and streamline the connection to other tools. I enjoyed several talks in the Programming track which elucidated topics like parallel computing and asynchronous processing with R. As R is a single-threaded language, these methods become increasingly important for processes with longer run time. R Community and RLadies In keeping with their commitment to the open source community, RStudio announced their new status as a Public Benefit Corporation. Diversity and inclusivity were promoted throughout the conference, including a RLadies meetup event hosted by RLadies SF! This was a great opportunity to connect with other chapters and share tips and tricks for building local programming communities. Interested in learning more? Many of these talks are available online. Check out https://resources.rstudio.com/rstudio-conf-2020 to experience the conference. To view CANA’s take on last year's 2019 RStudio Conference, check out Lucia’s previous blog post. Lucia is a Senior Operations Research Analyst at CANA Advisors. To find more content on our favorite professional events, continue to visit our CANA Connection. TEAM CANA MEMBER SHOWCASE Kaitlyn Wark | Data Science Analyst CANA team member, Ms. Kaitlyn Wark, is a data science analyst for CANA Advisors. She develops predictive models and data analysis software that empower customers to make data-driven decisions. Kaitlyn has six years of analytics experience in the public and private sector and leverages domain expertise in education, housing, non-profit management, and insurance. She is a board member of Mentor Virginia. “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” -Maya Angelou Kaitlyn specializes in transforming technically complicated analytics products into understandable, visually attractive applications for non-technical stakeholders. Since joining CANA, Kaitlyn has taken on the role of supporting our expanding data science practice. Previous to CANA, Kaitlyn was a Homeless Projects Evaluator at the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services (DBHDS). Kailtyn architected a data exploration and reporting application that allowed DBHDS leadership to quickly assess the overall performance of statewide housing programs and communicate areas of improvement to local housing programs. Equipped with evidence of the program’s impact, DBHDS successfully made the case for $9.2 million in continued funding for PSH programs to the General Assembly. In her role as Program Evaluation Officer, Kaitlyn developed The Community Foundation for a Greater Richmond’s first interactive dashboard, thereby enabling the Board to easily monitor the results of the Foundation’s social investment strategy and shift towards data-driven grant-making. Kaitlyn is passionate about applying software development best practices and design principles to data science software. In her non-profit and state government analyst roles, Kaitlyn championed the use of open-source statistical software to automate routine analysis and reporting tasks. Kailtyn also has experience deploying analytics software in a larger-scale production environment. She designed and deployed predictive models at Markel, a Fortune 500 insurance company, helping underwriters to more effectively and profitably manage their time pursuing new business. Kaitlyn introduced software development principles and successfully advocated for a test-driven development approach to the team’s data science workflow to increase the scalability and technical rigor of the analytics products they shipped. She contributed to a small team’s ambitious effort to develop software that scaled the development and deployment of customer churn models across multiple lines of business. This scaled approach reduced the time required to spin up a new customer retention model by 67%. Kaitlyn holds a Masters in Social Service Administration and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the University of Chicago. One thing we take pride in is our CANA Culture. As Kaitlyn says, "I love the camaraderie and can-do culture at CANA. All of my colleagues are excited by challenges and naturally curious, and that makes work fun." Working from home is a routine for every CANA member, and Kaitlyn's favorite part about WFH is "I love that I get to trade my commute time for breakfast with my kids and extra play time in the back yard before dinner. I also love that working from home puts me in charge of coffee selection and the brewing pace!" If you would like to learn more about Kaitlyn and how she and CANA Advisors can take your Data Science Analytics to the next level, please contact her at kwark@canallc.com! #teamCANA #canaadvisors #kaitlynwark There Is No Perfect Way to Work Virtually, So Stop Looking for One and Start Working! Thoughts On Working Virtually in Today's World by Walt DeGrange There is no, one right way to work virtually. This may not be a surprise to folks that were forced into this mode by the recent Corona Virus situation. Of course, you can do a Google search and get thousands of "Ten things to make working from home easier" or "Increase your productivity working from home." You could literally spend the next ten years surfing these links, but I would argue that you would see marginal improvements at best and waste tons of time and money. So why do I know this, and what should you do? First, I have been working virtually for six years. Over that time, I lived in a two-bedroom apartment, many hotel rooms, and a three-bedroom house with a dedicated office. I have worked virtually on the road from airports, coffee shops, co-working facilities, and baseball stadiums. So I have experience. The second question is, what should you do? My short answer is, "get to work!" Let us first explore the non-virtual workspace, better known as the office. Offices are basically factories for knowledge workers. Spaces are designed for efficiency with team members located close to each other. Conference rooms, bathrooms, and snack areas are centrally located to allow for quick use. Organizations design office space to increase productivity and minimize cost. Variation is the enemy of a well-designed office. Your virtual workspace is designed by you. It can be a space designated as a home office, a lawn chair on your back deck, a couch in the family room, a kitchen table, or a seat at a baseball stadium. The sky is the limit, and the variation is infinite! That is both good and bad news. After all of those years, not having to think about the space where you work now, you have choices. To say this might be a little overwhelming is an understatement. Where do you start? I would recommend just start with what you have. You have a kitchen table, use it. A dedicated room for a home office, use it. You just need to start working. As you work over the next few days and weeks, you will begin to make observations. Perhaps your kitchen chair is uncomfortable after one hour sitting in it. Put any observations you make on a list either on paper or electronically. After one month, review your list. Then develop a list of ideas to mitigate your negatively impactful comments. You can list buying something to make things better, and I also challenge you to list ways to fix things by not spending money. For example, that uncomfortable kitchen chair, obviously you could buy a pad for the chair or perhaps a new, more comfortable chair. You could also get up and walk around the room every 45 minutes and take a break or change locations completely. Every person's experience working in the virtual environment is going to be different. There is no kit that organizations can send all of their team members to work efficiently virtually. Therefore sending all team members a standing desk is not going to create a great work environment for everyone. There is too much variation in team member's virtual spaces (i.e., house, coffee shop, co-working facility, etc.) to create a one size fits all solution. You must discover what works for you, and that takes time. Interested in learning more? We will be talking more about working virtually in our upcoming free webinar series. Information is below.  Walt is our Director of Analytics Capabilities at CANA Advisors. To find more content on working virtually, continue to visit our CANA Connection. #WFH #WorkingVirtually #VirtualCompanies Connect with CANA ADVISORS in 2020 UPCOMING EVENTS CANA Advisors invites you to join us again on April 16th for Part Three of our webinar series on Working Virtually. Part Three is a conversation on parenting and caregiving while working from home. Our team members will share their stories, challenges, and tips in their roles as caregivers and professionals. SIGN UP HERE Sign up for the CANA Connection Newsletter! CANA Advisors 7371 Atlas Walk Way Gainesville, Virginia 20155 Telephone (703) 317-7378 Facsimile (571) 248-2563 Privacy Statement | Subscribe | Unsubscribe The CANA Connection Newsletter Copyright ©2019 CANA LLC. CANA Advisors is a veteran-owned, woman-owned, equal opportunity company based out of Gainesville, Virginia in the United States of America.

"You owe it to all of us to get on with what you're good at." - W. H. Auden We are excited to welcome our newest Resource Manager, Cherish Joostberns. Cherish has 20 years of leadership experience in the Marine Corps, with demonstrated proficiencies in logistics, personnel recruitment, and operational planning. She has spent several years in civilian leadership roles, taking a special interest in human resources administration and team building. Cherish possesses a bachelor's degree in Russian studies from the University of Michigan and a master's degree in community and economic development from Pennsylvania State University. You can contact Cherish at cjoostberns@canallc.com Welcome Aboard! #teamCANA #CANAAdvisors #CANAConnect CANA Advisors is a veteran-owned, woman-owned, equal opportunity company based out of Gainesville, Virginia in the United States of America.

"If it doesn’t challenge you, it won’t change you". We are excited to bring aboard our newest Senior Logistics Analyst, Kolleen Young. Kolleen is a highly regarded military leader with more than 23 years of proven success in logistics management, global transportation, strategic deployment, and distributed sustainment support. Kolleen has experience and expertise spanning all facets of logistics, to include exercise planning, MPF operations, and the deployment and employment of ground combat, aviation, supporting arms, and combat service support units. Kolleen holds a bachelor’s degree in organizational leadership from Chapman University and an MBA from Brandman University. You can contact Kolleen at kyoung@canallc.com Welcome Aboard! #teamCANA #CANAAdvisors #CANAConnect CANA Advisors is a veteran-owned, woman-owned, equal opportunity company based out of Gainesville, Virginia in the United States of America.

It is our pleasure to announce the promotion of Connie McKissack to Director of Programs & Project Management and Joe Moreno to Director of Development. These are new leadership positions at CANA, which report to the SVP Analytics Operations within our Analytics Operations Group and complement our current Director of Analytics Capabilities. Since coming aboard CANA, Connie and Joe have demonstrated their outstanding abilities, commitment and leadership to CANA's team, culture, capabilities, and clients, and they are the right fit for these new roles! The development of these two new Director positions has been a careful, thorough process. As key leadership roles within CANA’s Analytics Operations Group, these two new Director-level roles will ensure that we consistently deliver high-value, technically sound, quality solutions to our clients across all of our analytics- and operations-focused projects. In her new role, as Director of Programs & Project Management, Connie will lead CANA’s program and project management practice focusing on client relationships and our delivery of quality products and services. Joe’s role as Director of Development allows CANA to leverage his experience in using different types of development approaches and working with a variety of development teams to use technologies and methods to deliver quality, solution-based products to our clients. Please join us in congratulating Connie and Joe on their promotions! #CANAAdvisors #TeamCANA #Analytics #Logistics CANA Advisors is a veteran-owned, woman-owned, equal opportunity company based out of Gainesville, Virginia in the United States of America.

The CANA Team continues to expand as we proudly welcome our new Senior Contracts Manager, Kristin Fairman! Kristin is a diversified Contracts Administrator with 17 years of success in U.S. Government and Commercial contracting. Kristin possesses highly coveted skills by the contracting Community, Government, and Industry and provides cradle to grave contract administration including solicitation evaluation, bid & proposal preparation, contract negotiations, modifications, and closeout. Kristin is a graduate of The University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown where she received her Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration/Marketing. You can contact Kristin at kfairman@canallc.com. Welcome Aboard! #teamCANA #CANAAdvisors #CANAConnect CANA Advisors is a veteran-owned, woman-owned, equal opportunity company based out of Gainesville, Virginia in the United States of America.

The Colorado Mountain Club (CMC) recently received the 2020 Public Lands Alliance (PLA) Innovative Product Award for the CMC Recreation Impact Monitoring System (CMC RIMS). CANA is a proud technology partner of CMC and helped develop and currently maintains the CMC RIMS. PLA’s Innovative Product Award recognizes an interpretive product of any medium created in partnership by a nonprofit organization and land management agency that embodies a path-breaking approach to achieve a public lands mission. The CMC RIMS includes a mobile app, data environment, and dashboards. The CMC RIMS Mobile App is free to all users and allows crowd sourcing of outdoor recreation use and assessment data to capture impacts on outdoor recreation natural resources. The data environment provides a collection point for multiple data sources - including the mobile app data - that is then delivered to Natural Resource Land Managers, counties and municipalities for use in making resource allocation decisions. The CANA Foundation provided the initial version of the RIMS Mobile App. Since then, CANA has been partnering with CMC to maintain the app and develop the data environment and dashboards. The CANA team including, Dan Sterrett (Principal Software Developer) and Norm Reitter (Chief Analytics Officer), and CANA’s partners at ReconInsight have been working with CMC’s Conservation Director, Julie Mach, to develop the CMC RIMS and provide resources for stakeholders including, public land managers, counties, local municipalities, and conservation-minded volunteer groups. CMC RIMS has proven to be a key technology enabler to help CMC build their tools, networks, and capacities supporting their Strategic Plan 2025 Conservation & Stewardship goals. Find out more about the CMC's Strategic Plan 2025 Conservation & Stewardship goals on page 16, here. We encourage anyone interested to download the free CMC RIMS app onto your Android or Apple Device from the Google Play or Apple Store! From there, you can either complete the app’s Online Training - just 20 minutes - to get access to the full assessment monitoring capabilities in the app or track your activities or enter basic impact data wherever you recreate! Check out our CMC RIMS brochure for a more detailed explanation of how CMC RIMS works. Thank you, CMC, for allowing us to be a part of this innovative project and congratulations! Please watch their acceptance video below. #TeamCANA #CANAAdvisors #ColoradoMountainClub #CMC #RIMS #PublicLandAlliance #CMCRIMS #MNTDATA CANA Advisors is a veteran-owned, woman-owned, equal opportunity company based out of Gainesville, Virginia in the United States of America.

CANA is pleased to announce that it has been awarded the Headquarters Marine Corps Installations & Logistics (I&L), Logistics Plans, Policies, and Strategic Mobility (LP) Professional Services IDIQ-MAC. The IDIQ-MAC will provide professional support services over a five-year ordering period with a shared maximum value of over $94 million. As one of five prime awardees, CANA will compete for individual task orders over the course of the five-year period of performance, with work expected to be completed in March of 2025. CANA looks forward to tackling the toughest logistics, maintenance, distribution, and supply challenges facing the Marine Corps and to delivering its best-value approach supporting the U.S. Marine Corps logistics enterprise into the coming decade and beyond. CANA is proud to partner with industry experts, and as stated best by Rob Cranston, CANA’s Founder and President, "The CANA Team that includes CGI, Alion, UNCOMN and Deloitte, is honored to have been selected for LP’s small business IDIQ. Our Team is ready to support I&L’s objectives in logistics plans, policies, and concepts. Our Team of USMC SME’s, technology, innovation, and analytics experts brings extensive experience delivering the latest ‘open and smart solutions’ to overcome the increasingly complex challenges facing the U.S. Marine Corps.” For more information on this contract, please visit: https://www.defense.gov/Newsroom/Contracts/Contract/Article/2103659/ For more information on the CANA Team, please contact Mr. Rob Cranston, CANA’s President at rcranston@canallc.com or Ms. Connie McKissack, CANA’s LP IDIQ PM at cmckissack@canallcom.com. #TeamCANA #CANAAdvisors #Analytics #Logistics #Innovation #Distribution #Maintenance

What is CANA up to? Last Thursday our CANA Team Members, Jason Fincher and Tom Fields, attended the Hiring Our Heroes event in Washington, D.C. CANA supports the Hiring our Heroes Corporate Fellowship, hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, by incorporating transitioning military veterans into the CANA team for a 12 week structured program. The HoH Networking Night is an opportunity for prospective fellows to meet participating companies and the current cohort. Tom Fields and Jason Fincher represented CANA and talked with dozens of candidates. The pool of talent, concentrated at this single event, is truly impressive. Jason Fincher (left) and Tom Fields (right) CANA has continued to support Hiring Our Heroes since September of 2019 and we are looking forward to the future of #TeamCANA and #HoH! #teamCANA #CANAAdvisors #CANAConnect CANA Advisors is a veteran-owned, woman-owned, equal opportunity company based out of Gainesville, Virginia in the United States of America.

This January, several team members from CANA Advisors attended the RStudio Conference, both in person in San Francisco and remotely! At CANA, the R language is a part of our daily analytics practice, from quick turn analyses to high impact applications build in R Shiny. The RStudio Conference provides a great opportunity to learn about the latest trends in the language and connect with others in the community. Here are a few takeaways from CANA Senior Operations Research Analyst, Lucia Darrow, who attended the conference in San Francisco: Virtual Attendance As a fully remote team, CANA Advisors is accustomed to making the most of virtual meetings and seminars to share knowledge and build community. This conference was the first time several teammates attended talks online simultaneously, coordinating to make sure we covered all the topic areas of interest. The conference organizers allowed virtual attendees to ask questions in the main queue and participate with talks as if they were in the room. It was awesome to feel as if the other R users on our team were attending the conference with me, catching the talks I wasn’t able to attend! With more and more conferences offering virtual attendance as an option, this mode of concurrent virtual attendance is definitely something to consider. Trends and Best Practices Two trends that seemed to be of growing interest among intermediate and advanced users are custom R packages and taking R into production. With a slew of new tools and packages to make package creation easier, the use of internal or project specific packages has increased drastically. Formalization of shiny applications into production grade apps was a continuing theme this year. New packages like golem show promise in making this process more attainable for R programmers lacking traditional web experience. At CANA, we are always looking for best practices to improve our R products and streamline the connection to other tools. I enjoyed several talks in the Programming track which elucidated topics like parallel computing and asynchronous processing with R. As R is a single-threaded language, these methods become increasingly important for processes with longer run time. R Community and RLadies In keeping with their commitment to the open source community, RStudio announced their new status as a Public Benefit Corporation. Diversity and inclusivity were promoted throughout the conference, including a RLadies meetup event hosted by RLadies SF! This was a great opportunity to connect with other chapters and share tips and tricks for building local programming communities. Interested in learning more? Many of these talks are available online. Check out https://resources.rstudio.com/rstudio-conf-2020 to experience the conference. To view CANA’s take on the 2019 RStudio Conference, check out Lucia’s blog post from last year's event. Lucia is a Senior Operations Research Analyst at CANA Advisors. To find more content on our favorite professional events, continue to visit our CANA Connection. #TeamCANA #CANAAdvisors #Logistics #Analytics #RStudio #Conference #SanFrancisco #OperationsResearch #Analyst