One of my take aways from last week’s EARL conference was that R is more and more growing out of its academic roots into the enterprise. And with that come some challenges, e.g. how do I ensure consistent and systematic access to a set of R packages in an organisation, in particular when one team is providing packages to others?
Two packages can help here: roxyPackage and miniCRAN.
I wrote about roxyPackage earlier on this blog.
Building R packages is not particular hard, but it can be a bit of a daunting endeavour at the beginning, particularly if you are more of a statistician than a computer scientist or programmer.
Some concepts may appear foreign or like red tape, yet many of them evolved over time for a reason. They help to stay organise, collaborate more effectively with others and write better code.
So, here are my slides of the R package development workshop at Lancaster University.
Documenting code can be a bit of a pain. Yet, the older (and wiser?) I get, the more I realise how important it is. When I was younger I said ‘documentation is for people without talent’. Well, I am clearly loosing my talent, as I sometimes struggle to understand what I programmed years ago. Thus, anything that soothes the pain of writing and maintaining documentation must be good and should help me to better understand my ‘old me’ in the future.
The fourth Cologne R user meeting took place last Wednesday at the Institute of Sociology. Thanks to Bernd Weiß for hosting the event and Revolution Analytics for their sponsorship.
We had two fantastic talks by Klaus Jacobi and M.eik Michalke. Klaus talked about Eliminating cloud pixels in satellite images via chronological interpolation and Meik presented his new roxyPackage package, which makes it even easier to maintain R packages with roxygen2.