Episode 34: Enriching the Next Generation of R-Core Development

The R-Podcast has risen again! After sharing the story of my R adventures since the last episode, we focus on a very important initiative that could pave the way for the next generation of developers contributing to the future of R itself. I am joined by research software engineer Heather Turner and statistician Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal to share the story of how the new R Development Guide brings a new and accessible approach for learning how to contribute to the R project itself, along with their vision of the upcoming Collaborative Campfires to inspire and grow the community around this imporant effort.

Show Notes

Feedback

Email the show: thercast[at]gmail.com
Use the R-Podcast contact page

Music Credits

Opening and closing themes: Training Montage by WillRock from the Return All Robots Remix Album at ocremix.org

Heather Turner

Heather is a Research Software Engineering Fellow in the Statistics Department at the University of Warwick. She has previously worked as a statistician for Pfizer and as a freelance statistical programming consultant. She has been an R user since 2001 and has co-authored several CRAN packages, notably the statistical modelling packages gnm, BradleyTerry2 and PlackettLuce. Heather is on the board of the R Foundation and chairs the Forwards taskforce for underrepresented groups in the R community. She is also on the organizing teams of Warwick R User Group and R-Ladies Remote.

Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal

Saranjeet is a Statistician based in India. She has written the first draft of the R Development Guide under the mentorship of Heather Turner and Micheal Lawrence, funded by the R Foundation. Furthermore, she is supporting Heather Turner in the work on the outreach of the R Development Guide at the Digital Infrastructure Incubator at Code for Science & Society. Saranjeet has also worked with the Julia Language organization for Google Summer of Code 2020. She is eager to learn about open source and open science practices. Saranjeet co-founded the Research Software Engineering (RSE) Asia Association during her participation in the Cohort 4 of the Open Life Science program, to promote the RSE community and profession in the Asia region. She is being mentored by Michelle Barker to build the RSE Asia community. Recently she has been selected in the founding committee of NumFOCUS Project Incubator. This Incubator is designed to support the growth of open source scientific projects and communities.

Eric Nantz

Eric Nantz is a principal research scientist at a large life sciences company, creating innovative analytical pipelines and capabilities supporting study designs and analyses. Outside of his day job, Eric is passionate about connecting with the R community as the creator/host of the R-Podcast, Shiny Developer Series, and a curator / podcast host for the R Weekly project. Plus, he likes to share his adventures with R and general computing on Twitch livestreams at twitch.tv/rpodcast.