Maëlle's R blog

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!

I was fascinated by this xkcd comic about where to live based on your temperature preferences. I also thought it’d be fun to try to make a similar one from my R session! Since I’m no meteorologist and was a bit unsure of how to define winter and summer, and of their relevance in countries like, say, India which has monsoon, I decided to focus on a single country located in one hemisphere only and big enough to offer some variety… the USA! So, dear American readers, where should you live based on your temperature preferences?

My husband and I recently started watching the wonderful series “Parks and recreation” which was recommended to me by my fellow R-Lady Jennifer Thompson in this very convincing thread. The serie was even endorsed by other R-Ladies. Jennifer told me the first two seasons are not as good as the following ones, but that it was worth it to make it through them. We actually started enjoying the humor and characters right away!

Then, this week while watching the show, one of the characters did a very basic text analysis that made me feel like imitating him for a blog post – my husband told me it was very Leslie of me to plan something while doing something else which made me very proud. I tested my idea on other Leslie fans, and they seemed to think it was a great idea… and that this post should be the beginning of a series of R-Ladies blog posts about Parks and recreation!

In this two-short-part blog post, I’ll therefore inaugurate this series, what an honor!