Want to get some hands-on insights into running an open source community? Here’s an opportunity to work with me, rOpenSci’s Community Manager, on some non-code community-related work. I am looking for someone to work 1 day a week for 12 to 14 weeks. Working alongside rOpenSci’s Community Manager, Stefanie Butland, you will use guidelines and checklists to help run some of our established programs like our Blog and Community Calls.

We mean it. On behalf of rOpenSci, thank you to everyone who has contributed their creativity, curiosity, smarts, and time in the last year. We are fortunate to have paid staff who work to build technical and social infrastructure to lower barriers to working with research data. But it is our community, built on trust, that binds us together and helps us see who we are working for.

rOpenSci HQ rOpenSci Announces a New $896k Award From The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to Improve the Scientific Package Ecosystem for R. We’re excited to announce a new member of our team! Introducing Mark Padgham, rOpenSci’s new Software Research Scientist NumFOCUS recognizes Melina Vidoni and Will Landau for their contributions to rOpenSci.

Last year we reported on the joy of using commonmark and xml2 to parseMarkdown content, like the source of this website built withHugo, in particular to extractlinks,at the time merely to count them. How about we go a bit further and usethe same approach to find links to be fixed? In this tech note we shallreport our experience using R to find broken/suboptimal links and fixthem.What is a bad URL?

Testing is a crucial component to any software package. Testing makes surethat your code does what you expect it to do; and importantly, makes it safer to makechanges moving forward because a good test suite will tell you if a change has brokenexisting functionality. Our recent community call on testing is a niceplace to get started with testing. One way to make testing even harder is through including HTTP requests.

As of earlier this year, we are now automatically building binaries and pkgdown documentation for all rOpenSci packages. One issue we encountered is that some packages include vignettes that require some special tools/data/credentials, which are unavailable on generic build servers.

We’re thrilled to be introducing a new member of our team. Mark Padgham has joined rOpenSci as a Software Research Scientist working full-time from Münster, Germany. Mark will play a key role in research and development of statistical software standards and expanding our efforts in software peer review, enabled by new funding from the Sloan Foundation.

The United States Deparment of Agriculture National AgriculturalStatistics Service (USDA-NASS) provides a wide range of agriculturaldata that includes animal, crop, demographic, economic, andenvironmental measures across a number of geographies and time periods.This data is available by direct download or queriable via theQuick Stats interface.

rOpenSci thrives because of volunteer contributions from community members - submitting and reviewing R packages, serving as editors for software peer review, writing blog posts, sharing information about packages and resources, contributing code and documentation and answering others’ questions. Recently our fiscal sponsor, NumFOCUS, gave us an opportunity to nominate two contributors for recognition at the NumFOCUS annual summit.

Studies of muscle physiology often rely on closed-source, proprietary software for not only recording data but also for data wrangling and analyses. Although specialized software might be necessary to record data from highly-specialized equipment, data wrangling and analyses should be free from this constraint.

To the uninitiated, software testing may seem variously boring, daunting or bogged down in obscure terminology. However, it has the potential to be enormously useful for people developing software at any level of expertise, and can often be put into practice with relatively little effort. Our 1-hour Call will include two speakers and at least 20 minutes for Q &