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.

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.

Hace poco Yanina Bellini Saibene nos recordó actualizar el perfil de Slack: Después de hacer eso, decidí actualizar mis fotos de perfil en el sitio web de rOpenSci, y termine aprendiendo algunos trucos de git que voy a compartir acá. Gracias a Maëlle Salmon por motivarme a escribir este artículo y a Steffi LaZerte por revisarlo.

GitHub recently previewed ‘Copilot Workspace’, which aims to use generative AI to assist software developers. Rather than just giving in-line suggestions, as GitHub copilot does, workspace allows users to map out and execute entire projects. We got early preview access to the tool, so decided to see how well it performed for our needs in Epiverse-TRACE.

The Wikipedia entry for OpenCitations is woefully out of date, inaccurate and brief. As Directors of OpenCitations, Silvio and I are unable to improve this situation because of Wikipedia’s proper conflict-of-interest restriction on self-promotion. OpenCitations is actively seeking greater involvement from members of the global academic community, as explained in our Mission Statement.

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.

Say you have a bug report or feature request to make to a package.How can you use information on GitHub to manage your expectations (will there be a quick fix) and actions (should you go ahead and fork the repository)?In this post, we shall go over sources of information and explain how they can be used.In the end, there is no magical recipe, except perhaps graciousness, as software is made by humans.

rOpenSci Software Peer Review’s guidance is gathered in an online book that keeps improving!This blog post summarises what’s new in our Dev Guide 0.8.0, with all changes listed in the changelog. Farewell Stefanie Butland After many years of fabulous contributions to the rOpenSci community, Stefanie Butland left the role of community manager at the start of 2022.

Following our recent post on “Safeguards and Backups for GitHub Organizations”, nearly one month ago we went one step further and made two-factor authentication (2FA) required for all members and outside collaborators of our main organization, ropensci.It was a timely decision as GitHub since then announced it will require all users who contribute code on GitHub.com to enable one or more forms of two-factor authentication (2FA) by the end of

Did you know that GitHub lets you refer to the default branch of any repository by substituting the branch name with HEAD in the url? This is a very useful trick to write robust code that works regardless of whether the default branch is called main or master, and will keep working when the default branch gets renamed at some point.