rOpenSci | From Novice to Contributor: Making and Supporting First-Time Contributions to FOSS · Community Call
January 20, 2025

From Novice to Contributor: Making and Supporting First-Time Contributions to FOSS

By Yanina Bellini Saibene. With Yi-Chin Sunny Tseng, Pascal Burkhard, Yaoxiang Li, Hugo Gruson.

🕓 Monday, 20 January 2025 16:00 UTC -

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Join the meeting: https://numfocus-org.zoom.us/j/82222962127?pwd=P93L8kALJvYfzFJzv0UoRarNqCRpt8.1

Meeting ID: 82222962127 Passcode: 393120

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Contributing to open source can be very rewarding, but also incredibly intimidating. When we asked about first time contributions on the rOpenSci Slack, people recalled the challenges and mistakes they made, but mostly how much they learned from and enjoyed that experience.

In this community call moderated by Hugo Gruson, our speaker, Yaoxiang Li will discus the importance of tests with respect to first-time contributions, and share best practices and advanced techniques for supercharging R package quality with testthat, Pascal Burkhard will discuss the basic git skills that can help to make a first contribution, and Sunny Tseng will share practical advice for making first contributions, common challenges and how to overcome them.

This event is supported by NumFOCUS Small Development Grants.

See below for speaker bios and resources.

Speakers

Portrait of Yi-Chin Sunny Tseng
Yi-Chin Sunny Tseng

Sunny Tseng is a Vancouver-based data scientist and PhD candidate specializing in avian acoustics. She enjoys the welcoming community that open-source science brings to her career. Sunny is also a scientific infographic designer, blending art with conservation research. As a 2023-2024 rOpenSci Champion, she recently released her first R package, bbsTaiwan, linking her passion for open science with her Taiwanese roots—and featuring her bird art as the logo.

Portrait of Pascal Burkhard
Pascal Burkhard

Pascal is a geography and computer science teacher in a Swiss high school, and has been using R for about 15 years now. Pascal mostly does visualizations for lessons (graphs and maps), but is also a big fan of Quarto to create documents, presentations and books that can all be organized into clean websites to use as a teaching platform.

Portrait of Yaoxiang Li
Yaoxiang Li

Yaoxiang Li is a Senior Bioinformatician at Georgetown University. He has extensive experience in developing R packages, focusing on making complex bioinformatics data accessible. He is passionate about improving open-source software quality, supporting new contributors, and promoting reproducibility in computational biology. Yaoxiang is deeply interested in both statistical theory and the application of machine learning in biomedical research. He has made significant contributions to the R ecosystem, including co-authoring several rOpenSci packages and contributing to R-core through bug fixes.

Portrait of Hugo Gruson
Hugo Gruson

Hugo Gruson is an evolutionary biologist who fell in love with R and R package development during his PhD. He is now working full-time as an R package developer, with a current focus on making the ecosystem of R packages for epidemiology more robust.

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