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.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

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.

At rOpenSci, much of our code, content and infrastructure is hosted on GitHub over several organizations – described on our resources page.This post summarizes some steps we’ve taken to safeguard our GitHub organizations.Paying attention to access rights &

We have been working hard behind the scenes on the upcoming release of our new git package named gert, a joint effort from rOpenSci and the Tidyverse team. One of the main features of gert is the out-of-the-box authentication mechanism, which is provided via the new credentials package.

After soliciting, reviewing, and publishing over 100 blog posts and tech notes by rOpenSci community members, we have created the rOpenSci Blog Guide for Authors and Editors to address many frequently asked questions and frequently given suggestions. Technically, we structured the content as a bookdown gitbook.

“Continuous Integration” (CI) has become a standard for proper software development.Checking the integrity of software after changes have been made is essential to ensure its proper functionality.Also, CI helps catch problems introduced by dependencies early when executed on a regular basis (usually done via scheduled CRON runs). Multiple professional providers exist (Travis CI, AppVeyor CI, Circle CI, etc.) which offer CI services to the