I was listening to a Bike Shed podcast episode 189, “It’s Gonna Work, Definitely, No Problems Whatsoever”, and starting at 27:44 there was a conversation about exception handling. Specifically it was about exception handling in control flow when doing web API requests. This topic piqued my interest straight away as I do a lot of API stuff (making and wrapping). The part of the conversation that I want to address is their conclusion that exceptions in control flow are an anti-pattern....

In doing a number of ports of Ruby gems to R (vcr, webmockr), I’ve noticed a few differences between the languages that are fun to dive into, at least for me. monkey patching Ruby has a nice thing where you can “monkey patch” classes/methods/etc. in other Ruby libraries. For example, lets say you have Ruby gems foo and bar. If foo has a method hello, you can override the hello method in foo with one from bar....

Let’s talk about trailing commas (aka: “final commas”, “dangling commas”). Trailing commas refers to a comma at the end of a series of values in an array or array like object, leaving an essentially empty slot. e.g., [1, 2, 3, ] I kind of like them when I work on Ruby and Python projects. A number of advantages of trailing commas have been pointed out, the most common of which is diffs:...

I’m sure there’s already a way to do this, but here goes. OR maybe this is an anti-pattern. Either way, this is me, asking the stupid question. I ran into this a few hours ago: Sys.unsetenv("ENTREZ_KEY") library(brranching) mynames <- c("Poa annua", "Salix goodingii", "Helianthus annuus") phylomatic_names(taxa = mynames, format='rsubmit') No ENTREZ API key provided Get one via taxize::use_entrez() See https://ncbiinsights.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2017/11/02/new-api-keys-for-the-e-utilities/ No ENTREZ API key provided Get one via taxize::use_entrez() See https://ncbiinsights....

The longer you do anything, the more preferences you may develop for that thing. One of these things is making R packages. One preference I’ve developed is in limiting package dependencies - or at least limiting to the least painful dependencies - in the packages I maintain. Ideally, if a base R solution can be done then do it that way. Everybody has base R packages if they are using R, so you can’t fail there, at least on package installation....

I occasionally think about these various topics and ping back and forth between them, thinking I’ve got to make a package more user friendly, then back to thinking oh, I really should make this package easier to maintain, but what if that makes it less user friendly? I’ve wanted to get these thoughts written down for a while now, so here goes. User friendliness and code fragility It’s an unassailable good to make your code more user friendly....

Why Butte County? I went to college at California State University, Chico - in Butte County, CA. I did a BA degree in Biology there. It was a great program as it was heavily focused on natural history - with classes on herps, birds, insects, fish, etc. Specimen collections data Specimen collections data are increasingly being digitized, and often accessed via largeish platforms like GBIF and iDigBio. Here I’ll explore Butte County data found with iDigBio with the spocc R package....

In rOpenSci - as in presumably most open source projects - we want the entire project to be sustainable, but also each individual software project to be sustainable. A big part of each software project (aka R package in this case) being sustainable is the people making it, particularly whether: how many contributors a project has, and how contributions are spread across contibutors There are discussions going on about how to increase contributors to any given project....

Sublime Text is pretty great. Let’s start at the beginning. Why would my primary editing tool not be vim? My background is as a biologist, spending way to many years in grad school. My first programming language was R back in 2006; my first text editor about the same year was Notepad++; my first interaction with the cli was probably a year later or so (but that was on Windows)....

I was returning to a long-term project I’ve been working on - a package for caching HTTP requests in R called vcr, a port of the Ruby gem vcr - when you do that thing you do when you are porting a library from one language to another. I stumbled upon some methods/functions I wasn’t familiar with. For example, take_while I had never seeen before. It iterates over an array, returning the elements of the array that evalulate to true (for those new to Ruby, they use true instead of TRUE as we do in R) when passed through the function given....