Over the past thirty years I have written five technical books,co-written three others,and edited a further six.Since 2007 they have all lived in GitHub repositories,as did the first versions of the Software Carpentry lessons that I helped to write.

As part of our work documenting R-Universe,we’re adding screenshots of the interface to the documentation website.Taking screenshots manually could quickly become very cumbersome, especially as we expect they’ll need updating in future: we might want to change the universes we feature, the interface might improve yet again and therefore look slightly different.Therefore, we decided to opt for a programmatic approach.In this post we shall present

R is a language and environment for statistical computing.There are several tools and approaches for interacting with R, but not all are accessible with screen readers.This guide provides an overview of the tools and techniques available to screen reader users across different operating systems, with practical tips and resources to help them navigate the R environment.This guide may not be complete, but I hope it serves as a valuable starting

Recently Yanina Bellini Saibene reminded usto update our Slack profile: After doing that I went on to updating my profile photos on the rOpenSciwebsite, which ended up teaching me a few git tricks I would like to share here.Thanks Maëlle Salmon for the encouragement, andSteffi LaZerte for reviewing this post.Cloning as usual When I tried to clone the source code of rOpenSci’s website I realized the repowas large and it would take me several

A whole new frontend! As you may have noticed, we have given the WebUI for R-universe a big refresh. This is the biggest UX overhaul since the beginning of the project. The old “dashboard” had become a bit convoluted over the years as features and ideas were added and removed while the project was taking shape.

rOpenSci’s second cohort of Champions has been onboarded!Their training first started with a session on code style, was followed by three sessions on the basics of R package development, and ended with a session on advanced R package development, which consisted of a potpourri of tips with discussion, followed by time for applying these principles to the participants’ packages.Here, I want to share one of the topics covered: Package testing, and

The package qualtRics maintained by Julia Silge together with Joseph O’Brien provides functions to access survey results directly into R using the Qualtrics API. Qualtrics is an online survey and data collection software platform.Help test or improve qualtRics! Are you a heavy user of the Qualtrics survey tooling in general, and of the qualtRics R package in particular? Then you can help build and test the package.How to help?

The package targets maintained by Will Landau, and its companion packages, are pipeline tools, that coordinate the pieces of computationally demanding analysis projects.Help sustain targets discussion forums!

The package assertr maintained by Tony Fischetti, provides functionality to assert conditions that have to be met so that errors in data used in analysis pipelines can fail quickly.The provided functionality is similar to stopifnot() but more powerful, friendly, and easier for use in pipelines.Contributed to assertr!

rOpenSci’s second cohort of champions was onboarded!Their training started with a session on code style, which we will summarize here in this post.Knowing more about code quality is relevant to all Champion projects, be it creating a new package, submitting a package to software review, or reviewing a package.This training session consisted of a talk and discussion, whereas the next package development training sessions will be more hands-on.Why