Nic Crane
Hi, I’m Nic! I’m a data scientist, software engineer, and R consultant. I am part of the team who maintain the Apache Arrow project and co-author of Scaling Up with R and Arrow.
I’ve been using R for 15 years, and am an active member of various communities and sub-communities.
During my career, I’ve worked across multiple industries, including pharma, public health, academia, and startups, and have worked on a real mix of projects, encompassing everything from teaching new programmers how to work with R, to maintaining popular open source packages, to delving into the complexities of deploying R code in production environments where architecture and scalability matter.
Some highlights:
- I contributed to the Apache Arrow R project, acting as package maintainer and co-authoring Scaling Up with R and Arrow - available online and published by CRC Press in 2025
- I’ve built dashboards and internal tools supporting hundreds of concurrent users, deployed across the NHS; see my Posit Conf talk from 2019
- I’ve led workshops at major R conferences like Posit Conf; see the Big Data in R with Arrow workshop
NC Data Labs
The name NC Data Labs came about because I wanted to emphasise the interplay between using known processes and past experience with deploying creative solutions to the technical problems I’m asked to help solve.
Every project and client is unique and there is never a one-size-fits-all approach that applies universally. Many consulting projects with a broader scope involve the iterative process of developing a hypothesis, testing it out, examining the results, and then deciding what’s next based on drawn conclusions, and so I wanted the name of the company to reflect that.
I also found working at Ursa Labs one of the most technically challenging and exciting parts of my career and also wanted to call out to that.