Rectangling onboarding
Our onboarding reviews, that ensure that packages contributed by the community undergo a transparent, constructive, non adversarial and open review process, take place in the issue tracker of a GitHub repository. Development of the packages we onboard also takes place in the open, most often in GitHub repositories. Therefore, when wanting to get data about our onboarding system for giving a data-driven overview, my mission was to extract data from GitHub and git repositories, and to put it into nice rectangles (as defined by Jenny Bryan) ready for analysis.
Lessons Learned from rtika, a Digital Babel Fish
The Apache Tika parser is like the Babel fish in Douglas Adam’s book, “The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy” 1. The Babel fish translates any natural language to any other. Although Tika does not yet translate natural language, it starts to tame the tower of babel of digital document formats. As the Babel fish allowed a person to understand Vogon poetry, Tika allows an analyst to extract text and objects from Microsoft Word.
Monkeying around with Code and Paying it Forward
library(tidyverse) library(monkeylearn) This is a story (mostly) about how I started contributing to the rOpenSci package monkeylearn. I can’t promise any life flipturning upside down, but there will be a small discussion about git best practices which is almost as good 🤓. The tl;dr here is nothing novel but is something I wish I’d experienced firsthand sooner. That is, that tinkering with and improving on the code others have written is more rewarding for you and more valuable to others when you contribute it back to the original source.
The 2018 author and reviewer survey
rOpenSci’s package review system (aka onboarding) is one of our key activities to improve quality and sustainability of scientific R packages. The editorial team are constantly working towards improving the experience for both authors and reviewers. After our first year, we surveyed authors and reviewers who participated in our onboarding process to help us better understand what’s working well and where there is room for improvement. At the end of last year, we did so again, re-designing our survey so as to better track participant opinions year-to-year.
.rprofile: Noam Ross
Dr. Noam Ross [@noamross on Twitter] is a disease ecologist at EcoHealth Alliance in NYC, as well as an editor for rOpenSci. Topics of discussion included Noam’s history with R and rOpenSci, working in a team-driven research environment, and inspirations for pushing research processes and rOpenSci projects in exciting new directions. KO: What is your name, job title, and how long have you been using R?
