gh

You might have heard of the Advent of Code, a 25-day challenge involving a programming puzzle a day, to be solved with the language of your choice. I’ve noted the popularity of this activity in my Twitter timeline but also in my GitHub timeline where I’ve seen the creation of a few advent-of-code or so repositories.

AoC is largely an exercise in figuring how to write your favourite language as if were C or C++ 😁, which can be fun ... in moderation

— Jenny Bryan (@JennyBryan) December 12, 2018

If I were to participate one year, I’d probably use R. Jenny Bryan’s tweet above inspired me to try and gauge the popularity of languages used in the Advent of Code. To do that, in this post, I shall use the search endpoint of GitHub V3 API to identify Advent of Code 2018 repos.

Do you know Lucy? She is a very talented biostatistics PhD candidate that I had the chance to e-meet thanks to R-Ladies. One maybe superficial reason to admire her, on top of her other achievements, is her emoji game in git commits. Looking at Lucy’s git history (find her on Github), one wants to start using version control because she makes it look fun!

In this post, I will download many git commit messages of Lucy’s from Github’s API via the gh package, and have a look at the emojis she uses the most frequently.

When you do simulations, for instance in R, e.g. drawing samples from a distribution, it’s best to set a random seed via the function set.seed in order to have reproducible results. The function has no default value. I think I mostly use set.seed(1). Last week I received an R script from a colleague in which he used a weird number in set.seed (maybe a phone number? or maybe he let his fingers type randomly?), which made me curious about the usual seed values. As in my blog post about initial commit messages I used the Github API via the gh package to get a very rough answer (an answer seedling from the question seed?).

When I create a new .git repository, my first commit message tends to be “1st commit”. I’ve been wondering what other people use as initial commit message. Today I used the gh package to get first commits of all repositories of the ropensci and ropenscilabs organizations.