It was 2015, a Political Science master’s student had to process data to hand in his thesis and decided to take the opportunity to learn how to use R. To the long and winding road of the academic requirement was added an extra degree of difficulty: incorporating programming software from scratch, with a somewhat steep learning curve.

For this Community Call, we’re trying something different. We’ll start with a short talk by Julia Silge , then spend most of the time on Q & A with four panelists - Elin Waring , Erin Grand , Leonardo Collado-Torres , and Scott Chamberlain - moderated by Julia. Our panelists bring a wide range of perspectives so there’s something for everyone.

Making packages is a great way to organize R code, whether it’s a set of scripts for personal use, a set of functions for internal company use or a lab group, or to distribute your new cool framework foobar to the masses. There’s a number of guides to writing packages, including http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/. As you develop packages there’s a number of issues that don’t often get much air time. I’ll cover some of them here.