Maëlle's R blog

Huge thanks to Hannah Frick for her useful feedback on this post! Vielen Dank! This post was featured on the R Weekly podcast by Eric Nantz. When trying to fix a bug or add a feature to an R package, how do you go from viewing the code as a big messy ball of wool, to a logical diagram that you can bend to your will? In this post, I will share some resources and tips on getting better at debugging and reading code, written by someone else (or yourself but long enough ago to feel foreign!

I’ll be giving a remote keynote talk at the Rencontres R (French R conference) on July the 12th, all in French. This blog post is a written version of my presentation, but in English. I decided to not talk about package development for once, but rather about workflows and how to structure & run an analysis.1 Many thanks to Christophe Dervieux for useful feedback on this post! Merci beaucoup !

Edit: now there is an R package for server-side MathJax rendering, katex by Jeroen Ooms. Whilst I most certainly do not write LaTeX formulas on the regular anymore, I got curious about their MathJax rendering on websites.1 In brief : your website source contains LaTeX code, and the MathJax JS library (self-hosted or hosted on a CDN) transforms it into something humans can understand: some HTML with inline CSS but also some MathML for screen-reader users.

I’ve just finished teaching blogging with R Markdown at R-Ladies Bangalore. This has two consequences: I need to calm down a bit after the stress of live demoing & co, and I am inspired to, well, blog with R Markdown! As I’ve just read a fascinating book about the beanie baby bubble and as I’ve seen rvest is getting an update, I’ve decided to harvest Beaniepedia. Both of these things show I spend too much time on Twitter, as the book has been tweeted about by Vicki Boykis, and the package changes have been tweeted about by Hadley Wickham.

My kids got a cool electronic storyteller as a gift. It is basically a pretty cube that you shake to make it play tracks. La conteuse merveilleuse comes with pre-loaded songs and stories, but you can also add your own. Very handy, as we had e.g. CDs that came with magazines. According to the anti-manual1, to add a mp3 or wav file you own, you first need to convert it to the storyteller’s expected format by using the company’s online converter, la moulinette (the mill).