I’m excited to announce a new release of vcr: v2. vcr helps you record and replay HTTP interactions in your tests (and more now, see below). This release brings improvements in usability and security, it streamlines the API, and adds many new features.

Introduction At work (Fred Hutch Cancer Center) we’ve been working on an R package (sixtyfour) over the last ~1.5 years. This post is a quick intro to the package with some learnings about working with AWS. sixtyfour is a science-focused, more humane R interface to AWS.

Over the past few months at work we’ve been looking into web framework options for a project that currently uses R Shiny. Our needs have grown beyond what Shiny can provide. We decided to try Rails, SvelteKit, and HTMX/FastAPI to see which one would best suit our needs.

content_html

For work I’m reading and taking notes on my blog about cancer biology texts. The following are notes on most chapters of The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Some of these are not actual chapters (e.g., “Leukemia” is not a chapter). I listened (during many episodes getting a kid to sleep in the middle of the night) to this book borrowed from my local library with the Libby app.

What is uv I’ve recently started using uv to manage Python projects and packages: many projects at work and the one active package I have on pypi.org (habanero). I don’t really know enough about all the various Python tools similar to uv to give an informed opinion. Rather, this is purely reflections on using uv. uv’s tagline is: uv docs and source code. Reflections Fast It’s super fast.

webmockr v2 is here. You can find the source at https://github.com/ropensci/webmockr, and the docs at https://docs.ropensci.org/webmockr. There’s some big changes in this version; most importantly a breaking change, thus the major version change this time. Here’s a run down of the important items in this release.

While reviewing an R package at work I realized I wasn’t totally sure what advice to give about examples for internal functions in a package. That is, there’s an R package. The package has some exported functions, and some internal functions that are not exported.

Since most of my education has taken place above the organism level, and since my current job concerns sub-organism processes, I want to get more familiar with those sub-organism things. So I’m reading and taking notes on my blog about the stuff I’m reading.

cowsay is a command line program written in Perl. The original version had a final release in 2016 (that’s the version of many installed cowsay programs) and there’s a number of forks of that release in Perl. There are also many many versions of cowsay in other programming languages, like the one I maintain written in R, unimaginatively called cowsay. I wrote about cowsay here back in 2014.

At work I’ve been using Quarto quite a bit for website and books for work projects.