SMART Hackathon: Day 1

So day 1 of the #JHUSMARTHack 2014 is over and day 2 is underway. It's been awesome. One student estimated he did “one week's worth of work”. Some interesting (I think) things I thought about:

1. Flooding rain is good weather for coding. (As long as no sinkholes arise)
2. The Admiral Fell Inn is a pretty sweet place to host this event (and supposedly reasonably priced).
3. A lot of other conferences have Hackathons, such as OHBM. We discussed the potential for these at ENAR and JSM.
4. Headphones are good and bad at times. They can block out any talking but they also block out any cool discussions.
5. I'm used to coding by myself a lot, which is hard to break out of and when knowing to ask for help.
6. Shiny apps are easy to implement and cool products. (Not really new for me, but worthwhile to say).
7. It's good to have someone that knows languages you don't, such as Python.
8. You want to have example data before you come for your packages to be able to use, i.e. is IRB approved for distribution.
9. Doing some prep before, like reading through Developing Packages with RStudio, is helpful beforehand. (I think Roxygen2 should be default ON)
10. Using -- in Mac OSX when trying to put in options for R CMD check, such as --as-cran, turns -- into — (which fails on the check).

Check out my github repos (posted yesterday) for progress. I've added the most functionality to WhiteStripe (white matter “segmentation”) and fslr (a wrapper for FSL).

Today, I'm looking at the knitr vignettes, amongst others, to make my first vignette for these. I'm very excited I can write in R Markdown with these. Happy hacking!