Maëlle's R blog

You’ve probably seen people posting their #Best9of2017, primarily on Instagram I’d say. I’m not an Instagram user, although I do have an account to spy on my younger sister and cousins, so I don’t even have 9 Instagram posts in total but I do love the collage people get to show off… So what about my best 9 tweets of 2017?

On my pretty and up-to-date CV, one of the first things one sees is my Github username, linking to my Github profile. What does a potential employer look at there? Hopefully not my non informative commit messages… My imitating a red Ampelmann, my being part of several organizations, my pinned repositories described with emojis… But how would they know where&how I’ve mostly been active without too much effort?

A considerable part of my Github work happens in organizations: I’m a co-editor at rOpenSci onboarding of packages, I contribute content to the R Weekly newsletter, etc. Although my profile shows the organizations I belong to, one would need to dig into them for a while before seeing how much or how little I’ve done. Which is fine most of the time but less so when trying to profile myself for jobs, right? Let’s try and fetch some Github data to create a custom profile.

Note: yep I’m looking for a job and ResearchGate’s suggestions are not helpful! Do you need an enthusiastic remote data scientist or research software engineer for your team? I’m available up to 24 hours a week! I care a lot about science, health, open source and community. Ideally I’d like to keep working in something close to public research but we can talk!

Our brand-new baby received a fantastic picture book as a gift: Possum magic, a classic for Aussie kids. Thanks, Miles! In that book, Hush the possum and her Grandma Poss encounter different Australian animals and travel across well eat their way through the country. It is an adorable story with great illustrations! Reading it will make you feel like travelling to Australia, for instance to useR! 2018, except you shouldn’t because it is a very scary country:

Rough night with 👶. ☕ was a good start but it was the balcony 🐍 capture and release that really 💓

— Miles McBain (@MilesMcBain) 25 d’agost de 2017

However, you can travel and learn geography without leaving the comfort of a snake-free home… by mapping Hush’s adventures! Which is what I decided to do.

I was invited to an exciting ecology & R hackathon in my capacity as a co-editor for rOpenSci onboarding system of packages. It also worked well geographically since this hackathon was to take place in Ghent (Belgium) which is not too far away from my new city, Nancy (France). The idea was to have me talk about my “top tips on how to design and develop high-quality, user-friendly R software” in the context of open science, and then be a facilitator at the hackathon.

The talk topic sounded a bit daunting but as soon as I started preparing the talk I got all excited gathering resources – and as you may imagine since I was asked to talk about my tips I did not need to try & be 100% exhaustive. I was not starting from scratch obviously: we at rOpenSci already have well-formed opinions about such software, and I had given a talk about automatic tools for package improvement whose content was part of my top tips.

As I’ve done in the past with my talks, I chose to increase the impact/accessibility of my work by sharing it on this blog. I’ll also share this post on the day of the hackathon to provide my audience with a more structured document than my slides, in case they want to keep some trace of what I said (and it helped me build a good narrative for the talk!). Most of these tips will be useful for package development in general, and a few of them specific to scientific software.

Once again, a Twitter trend sent me to my R prompt… Here is a bit of context. My summary: Taylor Swift apparently plays the bad girl in her new album and a fan of hers asked a question…

Name a bitch badder than Taylor Swift 😍😛😤 pic.twitter.com/AkSyQBUIME

— Nutella (@xnulz) 10 de novembre de 2017

The tweet was then quoted by many people mentioning badass women, and I decided to have a look at these heroes!