Maëlle Salmon

R(esearch) Software Engineer & Blogger based in Nancy, France

maelle on the verge of laughing
©Photo Julie Noury Soyer

Current work

  • Part-time research software engineer for rOpenSci (since February 2018).
  • Part-time software engineer for cynkra (since June 2022).

I'm also...

More complete vitae.


Latest blog post & talk

Find all posts and talks. My blog posts are syndicated on R-bloggers and featured in R Weekly live feed.

Extracting names of functions defined in a script with treesitter

Coming back from a conference, we might be excited to install and try out the cool things we have heard about. I, going against the stream 🐟, decided to experiment with a tool I have not heard about last week, as I unfortunately missed Davis Vaughan’s talk about treesitter. Nonetheless, I caught the idea that treesitter is a parser of code, R code in particular. The treesitter R package uses the tree-sitter C library.

How your code might get rusty, and what you can do about it

Do you ever find yourself working on a codebase that has gotten a bit rusty over time? Or read an old script and have trouble understanding what it does? It happens to me regularly, be it code that I wrote myself, or code I was tasked with, such as the established igraph R package. In this talk, I share some of my strategies to suffer less when renovating a codebase, as well as prevention ideas to make future renovations less likely, or easier.


How to pronounce my name

My last name is Salmon like the fish and the colour, and you can pronounce it like that if you want. My first name, Maëlle, is derived from a Celtic word that means princess or chief. It’s pronounced “Ma-El” as “ma” in “macaroni” and as the Spanish “El”.