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Making packages is a great way to organize R code, whether it’s a set of scripts for personal use, a set of functions for internal company use or a lab group, or to distribute your new cool framework foobar to the masses. There’s a number of guides to writing packages, including http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/. As you develop packages there’s a number of issues that don’t often get much air time. I’ll cover some of them here....
A new version of jsonlite package to CRAN. This is a maintenance release with enhancements and bug fixes. A summary of changes in v1.2 from the NEWS file: Add read_json and write_json convenience wrappers, #161 Update modp_numtoa from upstream, fixes a rounding issue in #148. Ensure asJSON.POSIXt does not use sci notation for negative values, #155 Tweak num_to_char to properly print large negative numbers Performance optimization for simplyfing data frames (see below) Use the Github compare page to see the full diff on metacran....
Next week I’ll be in Washington DC to meet my peers in research community management as part of the inaugural class of the AAAS Community Engagement Fellowship Program! The program, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has a mission to improve community building and collaboration in scientific organizations and research collaborations by providing a year of training and support to a cohort of scientific community managers. The Fellowship will begin in January 2017 when we 17 Fellows gather for a week-long training course with leaders in the field at AAAS headquarters....
finch has just been released to CRAN (binaries should be up soon). finch is a package to parse Darwin Core files. Darwin Core (DwC) is: a body of standards. It includes a glossary of terms (in other contexts these might be called properties, elements, fields, columns, attributes, or concepts) intended to facilitate the sharing of information about biological diversity by providing reference definitions, examples, and commentaries. The Darwin Core is primarily based on taxa, their occurrence in nature as documented by observations, specimens, samples, and related information....
Our Community Call on December 15th covered a big topic in tech communities: “How do I create a code of conduct for my event/lab/codebase?”. Here, we cover some of the key themes and considerations that arose from the discussion and point to curated resources and examples to follow when developing a code of conduct (CoC) for your community. Three guest speakers shared different perspectives. Dr Pauline Barmby talked about the process and lessons learned as Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry recently updated their CoC; Ms Safia Abdalla talked about “Codes of conduct for open source: the stuff no one tells you”; and Dr Titus Brown talked about his lab CoC....
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