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.
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....
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. There are many existing tools to categorize and facilitate searching of R packages such as CRAN TaskViews, RSeek, Rdocumentation, Crantastic!, METACRAN and CRANberries. GitHub also provides lots of great metrics for individual packages developed there.
...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.
...charlatan makes fake data.
Excited to annonunce a new package called charlatan. While perusing
packages from other programming languages, I saw a neat Python library
called faker.
charlatan is inspired from and ports many things from Python’s
https://github.com/joke2k/faker library. In turn, faker was inspired from
PHP’s faker,
Perl’s Faker, and
Ruby’s faker. It appears that the PHP
library was the original - nice work PHP.
Use cases
What could you do with this package? Here’s some use cases:
...