Publications by Econometrics and Free Software
Announcing rixpress
As I’ve already discussed in this vignette of my {rix} package, it is very easy to run a {targets} pipeline inside of a Nix environment for increased reproduciblity. The main drawback of {targets} though, is that it is not possible to compute one particular object in one particular environment, and another object in another environment. It is als...
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Why we forked nixpkgs
Here’s why nixpkgs is a GitHub repository that contains tens of thousands of Nix expressions used by the Nix package manager to install software. By default, the nix package manager will pull expressions from NixOS/nixpkgs, but when using {rix} our fork rstats-on-nix/nixpkgs is used instead. Because forks can sometimes be a bit controversial, we ...
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Using options() to inject a function’s internal variable for reproducible testing
No image this time Imagine you have a function that does something complicated, and in the middle of its definition it generates a variable. Now suppose that you want to save this variable and then re-use it for tests, what I mean is that you want your function to always reproduce this intermediary variable, regardless of what you give it as inputs...
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New year, new blog
Happy new year! The blog has a new look! Well it’s not that different on the surface. But under the hood, it is quite different indeed! My previous setup was: GitHub to host the code, on each push the build process would get started on Netlify and then it would be hosted there. The engine was Hugo. This blog now still uses GitHub to host the code...
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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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