If you use ChatGPT, Claude, or even some local model through Ollama or HuggingFace Assistants, you’ll know that the chat interface makes it challenging to feed in an entire repo like a Python or R package, because functions, tests, etc. can be scattered across many files throughout a repo.

In the spirit of learning in public,1 today I learned about the .keep argument in dplyr. This doesn’t add anything you can’t do with a select or transmute, but might help simplify some of your dplyr pipelines.2 In the examples below I’m using a few rows from the built-in iris dataset to demonstrate how to use the .keep argument by creating a new ratio variable that’s the ratio of the sepal length to width.

It’s a short week here in the US. As I reflect on the tools that shape modern bioinformatics and data science it’s striking to see how far we’ve come in the 20 years I’ve been in this field. Today’s ecosystem is rich with tools that make our work faster, better, enjoyable, and increasingly accessible.

In the spirit of Learning in Public, I wanted an excuse to explore (1) click for creating command line interfaces, (2) Cookiecutter project templates, and (3) modern tools in the Python packaging ecosystem. If you’re primarily an R developer like me, I recently wrote about resources for getting better at Python for R users.

A Google search for “R vs Python” returns thousands of hits across sites like Reddit, IBM, Datacamp, Coursera, Kaggle, and many others.

TL;DR: Codeium offers a free Copilot-like experience in Positron. You can install it from the Open VSX registry directly within the extensions pane in Positron.