R package building workshop

By: Ryan Price

R makes scripting solutions to our data problems incredibly easy. A few lines of code can automate almost anything you can do in Excel, for example. But soon enough in everyone's R journey, they find that their R work is plagued by some of the same issues as their Excel work. Work is spread across a bunch of loose scripts (or one giant one), things break that used to work, fifty-line `magrittr` pipelines are impossible to debug, and on and on.

Enter: R package development, an R-native way to solve those pain points. R packages are NOT just for publishing to CRAN! They can be used any way that you already use R scripts, R Markdown reports, and Shiny Apps, but they can be significantly more robust and easier to debug (once you get the hang of them). R packages are also fundamental to engaging in the "DevOps transformation" buzzterm for R users. They allow your code to be tested, deployed, and managed by continuous integration and deployment tooling, and helps shift the responsibility of "productionalizing" your code from strictly IT to a cross-team effort.

In this workshop-style talk, I hope to scratch the bare minimum of R package development, and to inspire R users to incorporate the practice into their workflows. We will do this by migrating an existing script to an equivalent package structure.

This will be an interactive, follow-along workshop. To make the best use of the time we have together, please make sure you have the following installed/set up in advance:

A recent version of R (>= 3.3.0)

A recent version of the RStudio IDE

The following R packages (at least): `devtools`, `roxygen2`, `testthat` (I will also be using some packages from the `tidyverse` and `forecast` packages in the example package)

Rtools for Windows (https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools), or a C/Fortran R dev bundle for macOS/Unix-alike [e.g. for Debian-based systems like Ubuntu, you would need the system packages `r-base-dev`, `libssl-dev`, `libcurl4-openssl-dev`,`libgit2-dev`, `libssh2-1-dev`, and `libxml2-dev`; basically whatever you'd need to install the above reqs successfully (i.e. whatever helps to stop throwing 'ANTICONF ERROR's on package install)]

Patience and an open mind :) package development can be frustrating at first, but well worth it!

A developer can create & maintain R packages however they please, even without the listed tidyverse-adjacent R packages (they just make it easier; R can do package development on its own out-of-the-box), but I will be using the above tools for the workshop.

The meetup will be in The Showroom in the CIC building at 20 South Sarah Street, St. Louis, MO 63108. The building entrance is at the corner of Forest Park Avenue and Sarah Street. You can find directions at http://stl.cic.us/directions/ (CIC@CET).

We will meet for snacks, set-up, and conversation at 6:00PM. The presentation will start at 6:30PM and will be about 60 minutes long.