Contribute to workflowr package for reproducible data analysis

[jdblischak]

Hi all! I'm the author of the CRAN package workflowr. It combines literate programming (knitr and rmarkdown) and version control (Git, via git2r) to generate a website containing time-stamped, versioned, and documented results. Some examples of workflowr projects include fibroblast-clonality, rccSims, truncash, and threeprimeseq (this last one has been updated with the most recent release).

I'm excited to help mentor new open source contributors, and I've tagged some Issues with the label Chicago R Unconference. They range in time commitment from minimal (adding a safety check to warn a user about a potential issue) to more involved (a Shiny Gadget/RStudio Addin). I use testthat for testing my package, so if you're interested in learning more about how to do that, the safety check for a pandoc installation would be a good option.

• [ ] Fail early if user tries to use SSH but SSH is not enabled https://github.com/jdblischak/workflowr/issues/144
• [x] Fail early if pandoc is not installed https://github.com/jdblischak/workflowr/issues/75
• [ ] Allow user to add commit message interactively https://github.com/jdblischak/workflowr/issues/33
• [x] Create interactive RStudio Addin (Shiny Gadget) for wflow_publish() https://github.com/jdblischak/workflowr/issues/143

[alexpghayes]

Would you mind giving a brief explanation of what literate programming and version control are for people who might not have heard those terms before?

[jdblischak]

literate programming - mixing code, text, and results in the same file

• Resources:
  • Data Carpentry - Reproducible Research Literate Programming
  • R Markdown documentation

version control - saving snapshots of documents as they change over time with very fine-grained control (which facilitates experimentation and collaboration)

• Resources:
  • Version control on Wikipedia
  • Happy Git and GitHub for the useR
  • Software Carpentry Git lesson
  • A Quick Introduction to Version Control with Git and GitHub

[jdblischak]

@zaynaib addressed Issue jdblischak/workflowr#75 with PR https://github.com/jdblischak/workflowr/pull/146!

[jdblischak]

@zaynaib and @argdata addressed Issue jdblischak/workflowr#143 with PR jdblischak/workflowr#147!