R Forwards is an R Foundation task force that was originally set up in December 2015 to address the underrepresentation of women in the R community. An analysis of CRAN package maintainers estimated that fewer than 15% were women, and a useR! participant survey found that women were less likely than men to have experience contributing to or writing packages. In 2017 it was rebranded to accommodate other under-represented groups such as LGBTQI, minority ethnic groups, and people with disabilities.

Forwards have delivered face-to-face one-day workshops in Package development, supported by a grant from the R Consortium, for several years. These are heavily based on the R packages book by Hadley Wickham and Jenny Bryan. Recently we have been modularising our workshop materials to increase our reach by developing and delivering approximately one hour workshops suitable for online delivery and easy reuse by others.

Emma Rand (@er13_r) and Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel (@minebocek) are delivering the first three of these modules on 15th, 16th and 17th February. You can register using the links below. The workshops will be held on Zoom and joining details will be sent to attendees on the day.

Packages in a nutshell Mon, 15 Feb 2021 14:30 GMT

This workshop explains what a package is and why you might want to write one. It covers where packages come from, where they live on your computer and the different states a package can be in. We will explore the key components of a package using an example and outline the Forwards approach to package development process.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this module the successful learner will be able to:

• explain the rationale for writing packages
• find and explore their own package library/libraries
• describe the different states a package can be in
• describe the key components of a package
• outline the development of a package using devtools

Setting up your system Tue, 16 Feb 2021 14:30 GMT

This workshop explains how to set up your Widows or Mac system to develop version controlled package with git, devtools, RStudio and GitHub

Learning Objectives

At the end of this module the successful learner will be able to:

• list and install the programs and packages required for version controlled package development with devtools in RStudio
• check these are available to RStudio
• edit their .Rprofile to ensure devtools is loaded
• configure git for use, initialise an RStudio project as a git repo
• authorise and link to a github repo

Your first package! Wed, 17 Feb 2021 14:30 GMT

This workshop shows you how to make version controlled package linked to a remote repository on GitHub using the devtools approach.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this module the successful learner will be able to:

• create a simple version controlled package
• link a local version controlled package to a remote repository on GitHub
• explain the key components of a minimal package
• create and document a function with roxygen2 and document()
• use the package interactively with load_all()
• use check() to execute R CMD check
• explain, create and populate a DESCRIPTION file
• add a LICENSE file and explain the rationale for doing so