When laziness leads to innovation: making things you didn’t know you needed
teleport GitHub Action, the Comment Viewer Positron extension, the Unilur Quarto filter for assignment solutions, and a gamified teaching tool for ggplot2, alongside a discussion on the mindset of valuing “lazy” problem-solvers.
Nothing gives me greater joy than building little tools to make my life easier — even if they take ten times longer to make than they’ll ever save. In this talk I’ll share a few of these creations and the mindset behind them: the teleport GitHub Action, Comment Viewer Positron extension, Unilur Quarto filter for generating assignment solutions, and a sneak peek at a gamified teaching tool for ggplot2. Along the way, I’ll argue that sometimes it’s not the smartest hire you need, but the laziest one — a sentiment probably attributed to Bill Gates (though I’ve never bothered to check).
Michael Lydeamore
Dr Michael Lydeamore is a Senior Lecturer in Business Analytics at Monash University. A statistician and infectious disease modeller, Michael develops and applies methods ranging from regression and machine learning to large-scale mathematical modelling. Their research spans COVID-19 dynamics, antimicrobial resistance in hospitals, and quantitative approaches to health policy. They are an active advocate for open-source and reproducible research, sharing tools, code, and datasets with the wider analytics community, including VSCode extensions, Quarto templates, R packages, and GitHub actions.