In terms of scope, Dplyr is to R what Pandas is to Python, but both of these languages also contain very strong similarities to SQL as well.

OK, but in all seriousness, Dplyr is pretty dang cool (another grand invention by the one and only Hadley Wickham). And then you, my dear reader, will not spend four years of your life wondering what Dplyr is, realize your old dreams are no longer, teach yourself how to code, graduate in a global pandemic, explore an entirely new field in graduate school, and eventually become a data scientist yourself and revisit that initial awkward conversation in the form of a TDS article. But maybe, just maybe, if you get stuck in a car with a stranger who knows Dplyr, you can use the contents of this article to have a conversation. So now here I am, still cringing from a car ride I took with a nameless stranger four years ago.

In the end, I gave him my number so he could Venmo request my half for the ride, but just like the deafening silence of that rideshare, I never got a follow-up text from him again (let’s hope he doesn’t read TDS at work, lol). I tried to think of something to ask him about pizza after that, like if he got free pizza for life and if he believed it was possible to be addicted to cheese, but instead just looked out the window and continued played with my hands for thirty minutes. “Sounds…interesting.” I said, nodding and looking down at my hands. “Oh, that’s cool…what, uh, packages do you use the most?” I said, proud of myself just for remembering what “packages” were in code-speak. Trying to make small talk the best I could, I asked him about his life and found out that he was a recent engineering grad turned data scientist at Domino’s. As a freshman in college, when my life goal was still to become a hot-shot diplomat or United Nations ambassador, I took an Uber back to my university with a techie guy wearing our school colors that happened to live a few blocks from my dorm.

One hot encoding in r dplyr