In October last year, I was part of a webinar to talk about “Managing Large Codebases in R” with Alex Bertram of ActivityInfo. It is a bit late to write a blog post about this, I know, but I realized I never created one to spread the word around a lot more even though I did refer to it on social media… so here you go:

• Managing Large Codebases in R (October 7, 2022)

In summary, we discussed:

• Adopting a coding style for your team ({lintr}, {styler}, style guides, etc.)
• Organizing code into R functions (DRY principles, etc.)
• Organizing functions into R packages ({usethis}, {devtools}, etc.)
• Documenting and testing code ({roxygen2}, {sinew}, {codecov}, {testthat}, {pkgdown}, etc.)
• Using version control: git/GitHub (GitHub issue templates, branching, Pull-Request checklist, etc.)
• Practical examples from the field (some of the work I’ve been doing at ACDI/VOCA)

You can see my slides here, while Alex’s slides are here. For each section I also included a lot of links to other material that I’ve referred to/used over the years so hopefully it’s helpful!

Example:

Unfortunately, due to time constraints we couldn’t talk in more detail about git/GitHub as much as we would’ve liked but it does open us up to another potential workshop in the future. You can still read more about what I wanted to talk about in my presentations notes along with content from my previous blog posts regarding how I approach (open-source) collaboration work:

• Developer diary for {ggshakeR} 0.1.2 (a package for soccer analytics viz): Implementing Github Actions CI tools (codecov, lintr, etc.) into the workflow! (March 23, 2022)
• Developer diary for {ggshakeR} 0.2.0 (a package for soccer analytics viz): Working smoothly as a team on GitHub for R package development! (July 22, 2022)

As you may have noticed from my blog/Twitter, I’ve really went off the deep end in terms of doing soccer related analysis in the past year… not even data analysis with soccer data but just purely tactical stuff. I feel like I need to course-correct a little bit so in 2023 I’m hoping to have more R // data science related content on Twitter and/or my blog as well. To be honest, like this blog post, there are a few other R related things that I didn’t post last year due to my focus on soccer analysis and then the World Cup happened, so be on the look out for all that soon.

Thanks for reading, hope it’s useful to you, and don’t hesitate to contact me if you have comments/questions!