Launching webrockets at runconf17
We, Alicia Schep and Miles McBain, drove the webrockets project at #runconf17. To make progress we solicited code, advice, and entertaining anecdotes from a host of other attendees, whom we humbly thank for helping to make our project possible. This post is divided into two sections: First up we’ll relate our experiences, prompted by some questions we wrote for one another. Second, we’ll put the webrockets package into context and walk you through a fun example where you can live plot streaming sensor data from a mobile device.
Introducing our Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Dan Sholler
We are pleased to welcome our Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Dan Sholler. Dan is an expert in qualitative research (yes, you read that correctly) and studies digital infrastructure creation, growth, and maintenance efforts. Through this research interest, he was drawn to the open science community and its ongoing development of tools and communities to support sustainable, reproducible, high-quality research. With rOpenSci, he intends to investigate what drives scientists to engage with or resist open science tools and communities.
packagemetrics - Helping you choose a package since runconf17
Before everybody made their way to the unconf via LAX and Lyft, attendees discussed potential project ideas online. The packagemetrics package was our answer to two related issues. The first proposal centered on creating and formatting tables in a reproducible workflow. After many different package suggestions started pouring in, we were left with a classic R user conundrum: “Which package do I choose?” With over 10,000 packages on CRAN - and thousands more on GitHub and Bioconductor - a useR needs a way to navigate this wealth of options.
Hey! You there! You are welcome here
What’s that? You’ve heard of R? You use R? You develop in R? You know someone else who’s mentioned R? Oh, you’re breathing? Well, in that case, welcome! Come join the R community! We recently had a group discussion at rOpenSci‘s #runconf17 in Los Angeles, CA about the R community. I initially opened the issue on GitHub. After this issue was well-received (check out the emoji-love below!), we realized people were keen to talk about this and decided to have an optional and informal discussion in person.
Tackling the Research Compendium at runconf17
Two years ago at #runconf15, there was a great discussion about best practices for organizing R-based analysis projects that yielded a nice guidance document describing research compendia. Compendia, as we described them, were minimal products of reproducible research, using parts of R package structure to organize the inputs, analyses, and outputs of research projects. Since then, we’ve seen more examples and models of research compendia emerge (the organization of such projects is something of an obsession for some of the community).
