Publications by richierocks
From cats to zombies, Wednesday at useR2015
The morning opened with someone who I was too bleary eyed to work out who it was. Possibly the dean of the University of Aalborg. Anyway, he said that this is the largest ever useR conference, and the first ever in a Nordic country. Take that, Norway! Also, considering that there are now quite a few R-based conferences (Bioconductor has its o...
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The state of assertions in R
“Assertion” is computer-science jargon for a run-time check on your code. In R , this typically means function argument checks (“did they pass a numeric vector rather than a character vector into your function?”), and data quality checks (“does the date-of-birth column contain values in the past?”). The four packages R currently has ...
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New version of assertive and answers to tutorial exercises
I gave a tutorial at useR on testing R code, which turned out to be a great way of getting feedback on my code! Based on the suggestions by attendees, I’ve made a big update to the package, which is now on CRAN. Full details of the new features can be access in the ?changes help page within the package. Also, the slides, exercises and answers...
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R packages with unlimited licenses
I had an interesting email today saying that developers at the writer’s company wanted to use one of my packages, but weren’t allowed because it was under an unlimited license. I release quite a few of my packages under an unlimited licence, at least for toy projects and immature packages. In those cases, letting users do what they want is m...
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Qatar R User Group
Microsoft have announced new funding for R User Groups (Python and Hadoop too), so now seems as good a time as any for me to stop procrastinating and set up a Qatar R User Group. If you live anywhere near Doha, and are interested in coming along to a (probably monthly) meetup about R, then fill in the survey to let me know when and where is best ...
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Big package update: assertive is now 16 packages; new pathological also on CRAN
One of the bits of feedback that I got from the useR conference was that my assertive package, for run-time testing of code, was too big. Since then I’ve been working to modularise it, and the results are now on CRAN. Now, rather than one big package, there are fifteen assertive.* packages for specific pieces of functionality. For example, as...
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Introducing DohaR – A new R User Group in Doha, Qatar
I’m starting a new R User Group in Doha, Qatar. Our first meetup is on 26th May, at the HBKU Student Center in Education City. I’ll be talking about run-time testing with my assertive package, and there will be two other speakers who I need to find pretty sharpish. (If you want to talk, get in touch!) Both new and more seasoned useRs ar...
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mabbles: The Missing Piece of a Unified Theory of Tidyness
R programming has seen a big shift in the last couple of years. All those packages that RStudio have been creating to solve this or that problem suddenly started to cohere into a larger ecosystem of packages. Once it was given a name, the tidyverse, it became possible to start thinking about the structure of the ecosystem and how packages relate ...
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