I recently made my first R package and was asked how I did it. The answer of course was: I searched, read, and stumbled around until it was done. But having gone through the process I figured it was worthwhile summarising what I did and what I found tricky. First off, there are a ton of resources out there that describe how to go about building a package.

This post is something of a “how to” guide. The problem is how can you share code with a small team and keep it up-to-date? For ImageJ, the solution is simple. You can make an ImageJ update site and then push any updated code to the user when they startup ImageJ. For IgorPro, there is no equivalent. Typically I send ipf files to someone and they run the code, but I have to resend them whenever there’s an update.

This is a quick post about the punch card feature on GitHub. This is available from Graphs within each repo and is also directly accessible via the API. I was looking at the punch card for two of my projects: one is work related and the other, more of a kind of hobby. The punch cards were different (the work one had way more commits, 99, than the hobby, 22). There was an interesting pattern to them. Here they are overlaid.

A couple of recent projects have meant that I had to get to grips more seriously with R and with MATLAB . Regular readers will know that I am a die-hard IgorPro user. Trying to tackle a new IDE is a frustrating experience, as anyone who has tried to speak a foreign language will know. The speed with which you can do stuff (or get your point across) is very slow.