Dates are not so sweet It is known: parsing dates entered by humans is a huge pain: Source: https://xkcd.com/1179/ ISO 8601 nerds: a crack has developed in the old way. The new year has wounded both the m/d/yy and the d/m/yy factions. The time is ripe for a new global order. TONIGHT (2020-01-01) WE RIDE https://t.co/1YTL1SWDm2 — Brooke Watson Madubuonwu (@brookLYNevery1) January 1, 2020 Dates are a never-ending source of fresh hell.
tl;dr I don’t get paid to maintain poppr anymore and do so on my own time, so if you use it and value the work that I put into it, please donate to RAICES Texas ( https://www.raicestexas.org/donate) to help provide legal services to underserved immigrant and refugee families in the United States. Last Tuesday, I released poppr version 2.8.3, which fixed a corner case in read.genalex() and enhanced minimum spanning network rendering by drawing single-population nodes as circles instead of pies (with contribution by Frédéric Chevalier).
I started writing in R before the tidyverse became a thing and I never really had to think about non-standard evaluation when writing functions. Those days are long past and I’ve recently struggled with the challenge when writing functions for the R4EPIs project, which would stick out like ugly little trolls along side tidyverse functions. One of my biggest struggles was trying to figure out how, excactly to select a varaible from a user as either a character string or a bare variable.
Since the end of 2018, I’ve been a part of a collaboration between RECON and MSF called the R4EPIs initiative where we are trying to integrate a more standardized workflow of R for field epidemiologists so that it can be more cost-effective (no license fees) and troubleshooting among epidemiologists can be more effective. We have a repository to host templates for automated situation reports at https://github.com/R4EPI/sitrep. When we created the GitHub organisation, we wanted to make sure that the code being submitted to the repository was genuinely authored by the person and didn’t contain malware from a hijacked account1, so we required 2-factor authentication for the R4EPI github organisation from the start.
My package, poppr, has been on CRAN for over six years now and it has received more than 400 citations and just north of 70,000 downloads from the RStudio cran mirror. I can think of three reasons why this package has been successful: Our lab gave several workshops using our package over the years We have written extensive documentation with both web site and package documentation. I actively maintain and answer the vast majority of questions that appear on the poppr google group.