I love my iPad. It’s not exactly new: it’s a 12.9 inch model from three years ago. But even so, it’s light and convenient and fast enough not to be painful.

What I like about it:

• easy to write with (I have this keyboard)
• drawing with a pencil is almost as immediate, with almost the same control, as pen and paper
• it’s easy on the eyes when it comes to reading
• the split-screen mode is great for taking notes while reading
• the games are great – I’m fond of iPad re-imaginings of things like Baldur’s Gate
• when I’m traveling, I can buy mobile data and it mostly just works

I can perform plenty of my engineering and scrum masterly duties with it:

• I can manage and interrogate the AWS and Google Cloud web consoles
• I can use Google Drive, Docs, Sheets etc.
• I have access to my iCloud file storage as well

I do have trouble with some things though:

• Although I can ssh into things and do some scripting full-on development is rather tricky
• I like to dabble with data science ideas from time to time, for which I usually use RStudio

I realise there are several web-based data science platforms, Jupyter notebook services of various types, but I still prefer RStudio. Besides which, my other blog is managed via blogdown, which is easy to deal with RStudio. How can I work with this tool on the iPad?

#rstudio-server #google-cloud-platform #ipad #rstudio #cloud