R package test suites that include HTTP requests are dependent on an internet connection being up, the internet connection speed, changing behavior of the remote server, as well as changing response formats/data from a remote server. We ideally want to test functionality of our package relative to some known data that isn’t intermittently unavailable or changing.

taxize was seven years old this last Saturday!What is taxize? taxize is designed around making working with taxonomic names easier - abstracting away the details of what each of 20 or so taxonomic data sources require for a given use case.

The drake R package is not only a reproducible research solution, but also a serious high-performance computing engine. The package website introduces drake, and this technical note draws from the guides on high-performance computing and timing in the drake manual.You can help! Some of these features are brand new, and others are newly refactored.

Phylogenetic trees are commonly used to present evolutionary relationships of species. Newick is the de facto format in phylogenetic for representing tree(s). Nexus format incorporates Newick tree text with related information organized into separated units known as blocks. For the R community, we have ape and phylobase packages to import trees from Newick and Nexus formats.

Icons in R Icons can be added to your R Markdown documents using short prefixes which identify the font’s library.fa: Font Awesomeai: Academiconsii: ionicons For example, `r icon::fa("rocket")` can be used to add the rocket icon from Font Awesome. This interface is convenient if you are familiar with the icon you want, or if you are dynamically selecting your icon.

Our onboarding processensures that packages contributed by the community undergo atransparent, constructive, non adversarial and open review process.Before even submitting my first R package to rOpenSci onboarding systemin December 2015, I spent a fair amount of time reading through previousissue threads in order to assess whether onboarding was a friendly placefor me: a newbie, very motivated to learn more but a newbie nonetheless.I soon got

I’m excited to announce a new package for accessing official statistics from the UK. nomisr is the R client for the Nomis database. Nomis is run by Durham University on behalf of the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS), and contains over a thousand datasets, primarily on the UK labour market, census data, benefit spending and general economic activity.

Our onboarding process, thatensures that packages contributed by the community undergo atransparent, constructive, non adversarial and open review process,involves a lot of work from many actors: authors, reviewers and editors;but how much work ? Managing the effort involved in the peer-reviewprocess is a major part of ensuring its sustainability and quality.

Our onboardingreviews,that ensure that packages contributed by the community undergo atransparent, constructive, non adversarial and open review process, takeplace in the issue tracker of a GitHub repository. Development of thepackages we onboard also takes place in the open, most often in GitHubrepositories.

On March the 17th I had the honor to give a keynote talk about rOpenSci’s package onboarding system at the satRday conference in Cape Town, entitled “Our package reviews in review: introducing and analyzing rOpenSci onboarding system”. You can watch its recording, skim through the corresponding slides or… read this series!What is rOpenSci onboarding?

The Apache Tika parser is like the Babel fish in Douglas Adam’s book, “The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy” ¹ . The Babel fish translates any natural language to any other. Although Tika does not yet translate natural language, it starts to tame the tower of babel of digital document formats. As the Babel fish allowed a person to understand Vogon poetry, Tika allows an analyst to extract text and objects from Microsoft Word.