Unconf projects 4: cityquant, notary, packagemetrics, pegax

Continuing our series of blog posts (day 1, day 2, day 3) this week about unconf 17.

cityquant

Summary: The goal with the cityquant project was to build a digital dashboard for sustainable cities.

They also had a "spin-off" project called selfquant to get data from a quantified self google sheets template to keep track of weekly performance in various categories.

Team: Reka Solymosi, Ben Best, Chelsea Ursaner, Tim Phan, Jasmine Dumas

Github: https://github.com/ropenscilabs/cityquant

notary

Summary: notary is actually two things:

notary: An R package for signing and verification of R packages. It has functions for installing and verifying packages, validating GitHub releases, sourcing files with verification, and more.

r-security-practices: A bookdown book targeting users, developers, and admins on R security best practices.

Team: Stephanie Locke, Oliver Keyes, Rich FitzJohn, Bob Rudis, Joroen Ooms

Github: https://github.com/ropenscilabs/notary / https://github.com/ropenscilabs/r-security-practices

packagemetrics

Summary: packagemetrics is a package for helping you choose which package to use. Their tool collects metrics including CRAN downloads, GitHub stars, whether it's tidyverse compatible, whether it has tests and vignettes, number of contributors, and more!

This project combined two ideas from our brainstorming stage: Avoiding redundant / overlapping packages and A framework for reproducible tables.

Team: Erin Grand, Sam Firke, Hannah Frick, Becca Krouse, Lori Shepherd

Github: https://github.com/ropenscilabs/packagemetrics

pegax

Summary: pegax is a very alpha client for parsing taxonomic names. Taxonomic names are things such as Homo sapiens (human beings) wikispecies, or Ursus americanus (american black bear) wikispecies, or Balaenoptera musculus (blue whale) wikispecies. Taxonomic names can be hard to parse – and thus something called Parsing Expression Grammar (PEG) can be employed to help. We were lucky that Oliver Keyes just started an R package for PEGs in R called piton – which is now used in pegax to parse taxonomic names.

Team:

Scott Chamberlain (with help from Oliver Keyes)

Github: https://github.com/ropenscilabs/pegax