Publications by Econometrics and Free Software
Reproducible data science with Nix, part 12 — Nix as a polyglot build automation tool for data science
Nix is not only a package manager, but also a build automation tool, and you can use it to build polyglot data science pipelines in a completely reproducible way. For example, suppose that you need to mix Python, R and maybe some others tools for a project (by the way, some believe this will become the norm in the coming years, use your favourite s...
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Reproducible data science with Nix, part 10 — contributing to nixpkgs
I’ve very recently started contributing to the nixpkgs repository of packages, which contains all the packages you can install from the Nix package manager. My contributions are fairly modest: I help fix R packages that need some tweaking to make them successfully build for Nix. Most of these fixes are very simple one-liners. Most users of any fr...
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Reproducible data science with Nix, part 9 — rix is looking for testers!
After 5 months of work, Philipp Baumann and myself are happy to announce that our package, {rix} is getting quite close to being in a state we consider “done” (well, at least, for a first release). We plan on submit it first to rOpenSci for review, and later to CRAN. But in the meantime, if you could test the package, we’d be grateful! We are...
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Reproducible data science with Nix, part 8 — nixpkgs, a tale of the magic of free and open source software and a call for charity
This is part 8 of a series of blog posts about Nix. Check out the other parts here. TLDR: free and open source software is one of the most important common goods with enormous positive externalities: if you want to help funding it, keep reading! I wanted to quickly discuss about nixpkgs, which is the collection of packages that can be installed usi...
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An overview of what’s out there for reproducibility with R
In this short blog post I’ll be summarizing what I learnt these past years about reproducibility with R. I’ll give some high-level explanations about different tools and then link to different blog posts of mine. I see currently two main approaches with some commonalities, so let’s start with the commonalities. Commonalities These are aspect...
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ZSA Voyager review
Now for something completely different than our usual programming: today I’m sharing my thoughts on the latest ZSA mechanical keyboard, the Voyager. First things first: this is in no way shape or form sponsored by ZSA. But Erez, if you’d like to send me money you’re more than welcome. Here’s what the keyboard looks like: Your browser does ...
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Reproducible data science with Nix, part 5 — Reproducible literate programming with Nix and Quarto
This blog post is a copy-paste from this vignette Introduction This vignette will walk you through setting up a development environment with {rix} that can be used to compile Quarto documents into PDFs. We are going to use the Quarto template for the JSS to illustrate the process. The first section will show a simple way of achieving this, which w...
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Reproducible data science with Nix, part 6 — CI/CD has never been easier
Warning: I highly recommend you read this blog post first, which will explain how to run a pipeline inside Nix in detail. This blog post will assume that you’ve read that one, and it would also help if you’re familiar with Github Actions, if not, read this other blog post of mine as well This is getting ridiculous. The meme that I’m using as ...
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Reproducible data science with Nix, part 4 — So long, {renv} and Docker, and thanks for all the fish
For this blog post, I also made a youtube video that goes over roughly the same ideas, but the blog post is more detailed as I explain the contents of default.nix files, which I don’t do in the video. Watch the video here. This is the fourth post in a series of posts about Nix. Disclaimer: I’m a super beginner with Nix. So this series of blog p...
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Reproducible data science with Nix, part 3 — frictionless {plumber} api deployments with Nix
This is the third post in a series of posts about Nix. Disclaimer: I’m a super beginner with Nix. So this series of blog posts is more akin to notes that I’m taking while learning than a super detailed tutorial. So if you’re a Nix expert and read something stupid in here, that’s normal. This post is going to focus on R (obviously) but the i...
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