Most of us who work in R just want to Get Stuff Done™. We want a minimum amount of friction between ourselves and the data we need to wrangle, analyze, and visualize. We’re focused on solving a problem or gaining insights into a new area of research. We rely on a rich, community-driven ecosystem of packages to help get our work done and likely make an unconscious assumption that there is a safety net out there, protecting us from harm.

There are two things that make R such a wonderful programming environment - the vast number of packages to access, process and interpretdata, and the enthusiastic individuals and subcommunities (of which rOpenSci is a great example). One, of course, flows from the other:R programmers write R packages to provide language users with more features, which makes everyone’s jobs easier and (hopefully!)attracts more users and more contributions.

We have been writing code for R packages for a couple years, so it is time to take a look back at the data. What data you ask? The commits data from GitHub ~ data that records who did what and when. Using the Github commits API we can gather data on who commited code to a Github repository, and when they did it. Then we can visualize this hitorical record.