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Creating a monorepo of R packages with GitHub

23 Nov, 2023

Context

As an R developer who often works on open source project, I normally use one GitHub repository for new R packages. Team of R developers that work on several packages use organization accounts to gather packages that have a common scope. Popular accounts of this kind include:

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A few thoughts about pipes in R

25 Aug, 2023

Piping in R

Back in 2014, I discovered the forward pipe for R introduced in magrittr and since that time, I never stopped piping, although my piping habits evolved over time, especially with the introduction of the native pipe in R 4.1.

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Academic writing with Markdown, Visual Studio Code and Zotero

02 Apr, 2023

Academic researchers devote a significant amount of time to writing papers to report their findings. As this is an important aspect of their job, they need to use a document preparation system (a word processor) that they are comfortable working with. Another important aspect of scientific writing is to contextualize their work within the current body of knowledge. This involves citing other relevant scientific papers. To manage and organize all these references effectively, they use a reference manager system. In this post, I will detail my current setup for academic writing that revolves around two pieces of software (with ad hoc extensions): Zotero and Visual Studio Code (VS Code).

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Welcome 👋


The overarching goal of this blog is quite straightforward: tackle challenges and opportunities provided by this new era of open-access and computationally intensive research in the field of ecology. You will therefore find a collection of blog posts that reflect this: code snippets, ecological insights, new and exciting computational tools, opinions on various field of ecology and programming, etc.

In the interest of full disclosure, we also have a hidden agenda for this blog. As a group revolving almost exclusively around academia (for more about us) - and as such, some might say out of touch with reality - we have to write a lot, which can be quite hard (cough read procrastination cough). This blog is therefore also our attempt at significantly stepping-up our writing game!

Wordcloud created with the wordcloud2 R package; silhouette image available on PhyloPic (Lepidochelys olivacea); full R script available on .