Maëlle's R blog

Last week after my useR! talk, someone I had met at the R-Ladies dinner asked me for a list of all the links in my slides. I said I’d prepare it, not because I’m a nice person, but because I knew it’d be an use case where the great tinkr package would shine! 😈 What is tinkr? tinkr is an R package I created, and that its current maintainer Zhian Kamvar took much further that I’d ever would have.

I’ve now explained on this blog why it’s important to have small, informative Git commits1 and how I’ve realized that polishing history can happen in a second phase of work in a branch. However, I’ve more or less glossed over how to craft the history in a branch once you’re done with the work. I’ve entitled this post “Hack your way to a good Git history” because writing the history after the fact can feel like cheating, but it’s not!

This post was featured on the R Weekly highlights podcast hosted by Eric Nantz and Mike Thomas. “Make small Git commits with informative messages” is a piece of advice we hear a lot when learning Git. That’s why we might want to sometimes rewrite history in a branch. In this post, I’d like to underline three main (😉) reasons why you’ll be happy you, or someone else, made small and informative Git commits in a codebase.

This post was featured on the R Weekly highlights podcast hosted by Eric Nantz and Mike Thomas. I’m currently refactoring test files in a package. Beside some automatic refactoring, I am also manually updating lines of code. Here are some tips (or pet peeves, based on how I look at it / how tired I am 😁) Prequel: please read the R packages book The new edition of the R Packages book by Hadley Wickham and Jenny Bryan features three chapters on testing, all well worth a read.

Once again a post praising XML. 😇 These are notes from a quite particular use case: what if you want to replace the usage of a function with another one in many scripts, without manual edits and without touching lines that do not contain a call to replace? The real life example that inspired this post is the replacement of all calls to expect_that(..., equals(...)), like expect_that(a, equals(1)), in igraph tests with expect_equal().