Sharon Machlis

Contributing Writer

Sharon Machlis was a longtime writer and editor at Computerworld and later the Director of Editorial Data & Analytics at parent company Foundry. She is also the author of Practical R for Mass Communications and Journalism.

Sharon's Do more with R video tutorials won a Jesse H. Neal award for Best Instructional Content.

Recently retired, Sharon is still passionate about R and generative AI, and also blogs about the retirement life. You can find her on Bluesky at @smachlis.bsky.social, Mastodon at @smach@masto.machlis.com, and LinkedIn.

Articles by Sharon Machlis

How to get better results from local LLMs with Ollama

Thanks to recent Gemma 4 and Qwen releases, you can get some real generative AI work done on your own computer. Here’s how to optimize an Ollama setup.

By Sharon Machlis

Sep 15, 2026 13 mins

Artificial Intelligence Generative AI

10 tips for getting better R code from your AI coding agent

By Sharon Machlis

Jun 17, 2026 19 mins

Generative AI Programming Languages R Language

How to choose the best LLM using R and vitals

By Sharon Machlis

Apr 6, 2026 24 mins

Generative AI Machine Learning R Language

How to run an R data visualization chatbot you can talk to

Posit’s ggbot2 is a voice assistant for ggplot2. Tell it what you want in a spoken conversation, and it will generate plots and ggplot2 R code from your data.

By Sharon Machlis

Oct 16, 2025 8 mins

Generative AI Programming Languages R Language

Chat with data the easy way in R or Python

Why write SQL queries when you can get an LLM to write the code for you? Query NFL data using querychat, a new chatbot component that works with the Shiny web framework and is compatible with R and Python.

By Sharon Machlis

Sep 4, 2025 13 mins

Generative AI Python R Language

Databot: AI-assisted data analysis in R or Python

Databot is an experimental alternative to querychat that works with R or Python. And it’s now available as an add-on for the Positron IDE.

By Sharon Machlis

Sep 4, 2025 4 mins

Data Science Python R Language

How to create your own RAG applications in R

See how to query documents using natural language, LLMs, and R—including dplyr-like filtering on metadata. Plus, learn how to use an LLM to extract structured data for text filtering.

By Sharon Machlis

Jul 17, 2025 20 mins

Generative AI Programming Languages R Language

GenAI tools for R: New tools to make R programming easier

From IDE plugins to external chatbots and running LLMs locally, these new and emerging tools are bringing the generative AI revolution to R.

By Sharon Machlis

Mar 25, 2025 11 mins

Development Tools Generative AI R Language

3 of the best LLM integration tools for R

Do you need to add LLM capabilities to your R scripts and applications? Here are three tools you'll want to know.

By Sharon Machlis

Mar 11, 2025 17 mins

Development Tools Generative AI R Language

Create searchable Bluesky bookmarks with R

How to save and search all the Bluesky posts you’ve liked with the atrrr R package and use NotebookLM to ask natural language questions about those likes.

By Sharon Machlis

Dec 19, 2024 15 mins

Generative AI Natural Language Processing R Language