@milesmcbain@fosstodon.org
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milesmcbain

@milesmcbain@fosstodon.org

Code hacker, number cruncher, #rstats user, board gamer, road racer, plant eater, bass slapper. Coming to you from AUS / BNE.
http://micro.blog/milesmcbain

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Drmowinckels, to programming
@Drmowinckels@fosstodon.org avatar

📝 New blog post 📝

'The IDEs I use'

🧏 People who code have a tendency to spend a lot of time in various IDEs (Integrated Development Environments). They can be as simple as a text editor or as complex as a full-blown development environment. In this post, I'll go through my two go-to IDE's, RStudio and VScode, and why I switch between them rather than sticking to a single one. ---

👀 Read more at https://drmowinckels.io/blog/2024/ide

#R #programming #IDE #RStudio #VScode

milesmcbain, (edited )
@milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

@Drmowinckels I enjoyed this read 😀

You’re right about the file browser in RStudio, it’s oddly primitive compared to rest of app. I don’t think it’s had much love since early versions.

Not sure if you’re using it or not but one thing in favour of VSCode for me is the workspaces feature: https://milesmcbain.micro.blog/2022/10/18/are-you-data.html

Myself I’ve used only VSCode for a few years now with the vim extension but am the process of transitioning to neovim.

milesmcbain,
@milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

@Drmowinckels both vim and neovim have a built in terminal now, which I agree is an absolute non negotiable item to use R to its fullest with a REPL.

This is not a recommendation exactly but if you’re looking to round out your R editor experience you could give emacs + ESS a go. In particular the way they do help is excellent, and inspired me to try to recreate it in RStudio/VSCode with {rmdocs}.

milesmcbain,
@milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

@Drmowinckels I was using emacs for a bunch of different stuff at the time and ESS felt like it offered a lot. Though some complexity is added by the fact they’ve tried to generalise it over SAS, Julia, R etc. If you’re only using emacs for R then yeah I can see RStudio being way more attractive.

milesmcbain,
@milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

@Drmowinckels I realised I had all but turned VSCode into vim anyway due to the extensions I am using. And (neo)vim is much more free in terms of how you can create your own tools and automations. For VSCode (and RStudio actually) you’re expected to write and publish a package that contains your extension. It slows things down somewhat. In Vim you just source some code and now things work differently.

I also have some frustration with VSCode’s design - you can’t avoid a mouse completely.

jenn, (edited ) to random
@jenn@pixel.kitchen avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    milesmcbain,
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    @pbrane @jenn holy shit the microwave is an amazing parallel. I found an old microwave cookbook recently from the 70s, written in peak microwave hype by a person purporting to be a member of the international guild of microwave chefs. The food has the same uncanny valley vibe as generative AI. All these weird combinations of things being made to look like other things for some reason - like carved hotdogs stained with beetroot juice on a bed of warm pinapple.

    terence, to random
    @terence@fosstodon.org avatar

    Is there a good, up-to-date guide to set VSCode up for ? I keep trying but bloody radian won't work.

    milesmcbain,
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    @terence radian isn’t essential, and I would only recommend it if you’re on Windows and you can’t run your R console session out of WSL.

    milesmcbain,
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    @terence it has some nice features but I couldn’t tolerate the sluggish it brings to the console experience.

    However on windows it lets you skirt the R console line length limit, so in that context I found that worth a bit of slowness here and there.

    TimTeaFan, to random German
    @TimTeaFan@fosstodon.org avatar

    This R rant by @hendrikerz has got quite some attention on the bird site. The R community over here might have missed it due to the missing tag.

    I don‘t agree with much, but some points are worth for discussion / improvement.

    https://www.hendrik-erz.de/post/a-rant

    milesmcbain,
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    @statsrhian @TimTeaFan chiming in with my 2 cents: r-universe’s search is currently the best keyword / topic package discovery option if you know vaguely what you want. And you’ll find a bunch of gems not on CRAN mixed in: https://r-universe.dev/search/

    milesmcbain, to random
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    So my holiday reading was the (neo)Vim user manual. It’s very impressive to me how once you get a sense of the model - the concepts and how they relate… this vast surface area of functionality that seemed hard to remember before just becomes a thing you can derive commands in using logic and a handful of higher level principles.

    There are wrinkles for sure, but overall I think it’s an impressive feat of design. 👏👏👏

    I already made myself a minimal IDE in 5 lines of config. 🤣

    milesmcbain, to random
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    The First Problem Problem is the phenomenon where a disproportionate amount of effort goes into solving the very first problem in a workflow.

    E.g. in data as a platform you can connect to a bajillion different data sources and write queries with a ‘low code’ tool. Great that gets you the data. Problem 1. But the very next thing is like how can I ensure we’re all using the same query to do that aka centralisation, version control etc and you fall off a cliff.

    milesmcbain,
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    Or maybe now you wanna make a plot and the tool is like “our bar plots can handle petabytes of data sir”. And you’re like that’s cool but I was thinking some kind of heat map, and can we overlay that on a real map? And the window stops responding and you get an email saying you exceeded your compute budget.

    milesmcbain, to datascience
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    With this one the thrust is basically there are a number of "seemed like a good idea at the time" type approaches to reusing data analysis work that deliver benefit in the short term, but will get you absolutely wrecked by complexity and technical debt over the long term. I have found only one scalable way to manage the complexity of building data science capability. Yes it involves writing lots of packages 📦 📦 📦 📦 📦 😅

    https://www.milesmcbain.com/posts/data-analysis-reuse/

    milesmcbain, to random
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    Not sure how to feel about the ramp up going on over on LinkedIn. On the one hand, the platform is now mildly interesting, and I can see myself checking it out a bit more often. I still can't post without deep cringe though.

    On the other hand... did we really learn nothing from Twitter? 🤦

    grrrck, to random
    @grrrck@fosstodon.org avatar

    Shiny and friends, I’m thinking about a Shiny 201 or 301 workshop. Imagine you took Intro to Shiny, and you’ve made a few apps. You’re ready to learn the next thing to level up. What do you wish you had learned next?

    milesmcbain,
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    @grrrck how to manage complexity and shared state in large multi “view”apps so you don’t have to end up with all-knowing super components.

    milesmcbain, to random
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    Made this meme for a talk last year and I just successfully cracked myself up stumbling across it again:

    How it feels to be the "data" in data driven decision making.

    milesmcbain, to random
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    Pleased to see the number of cargo bikes on the school run this year has doubled. There’s now more pulling up at school than EVs. Sooner or later now the government is going to get it. 🚲🚲🚲

    Andres4NY, to random
    @Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it avatar

    C++ is just the absolute fucking worst. I can't believe it's still so damned popular.

    milesmcbain,
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    @Andres4NY oh man you’ve reminded me of the time I interrupted a lecturer to protest the idiotic use of a “Class” of students as his example for introducing CPP classes.

    milesmcbain,
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    @Andres4NY class Class {} FFS

    njtierney, to random
    @njtierney@aus.social avatar

    Hey folks,

    Tomorrow at 12pm Sydney/Melbourne time we will be trying out the first round of this live package review. Currently we have myself, @milesmcbain , and @adamhsparks joining for review, which is very exciting!

    We will be looking at
    @jadeynryan 's
    {soils} package: https://github.com/WA-Department-of-Agriculture/soils

    And if there is time,
    @ngiangre 's {kidsides} package: https://github.com/ngiangre/kidsides

    This link will show you what time that is in your timezone: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Twitch+R+package+review&iso=20240121T12&p1=152&ah=1&am=30

    Thanks to everyone who has been very helpful with sharing resources and experience and enthusiasm: @tanho, @wviechtb, @michcampbell and @hye
    I haven't had as much time to iron out the twitch stream as I would like so hopefully it all works out! I'll post a link here when I've got it working.

    Thanks for everyone's help!

    milesmcbain,
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    @jadeynryan @njtierney @adamhsparks @ngiangre @tanho @wviechtb @michcampbell @hye so glad it was interesting! I think Nick is onto something here… congrats on actually taking the plunge @njtierney

    coolbutuseless, to random
    @coolbutuseless@fosstodon.org avatar

    Adventures with CRAN.

    Adding tests and vignettes just seems to increase the exposed surface area for CRAN checks.

    If I want a better chance of getting my pkg on CRAN, I should just never add tests?

    milesmcbain,
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    @eliocamp @coolbutuseless another good developer arrives at the crushing reality that CRAN’s motivations do not align with either end users OR developers. Who do they serve? No one seems to know.

    LeafyEricScott, to random
    @LeafyEricScott@fosstodon.org avatar

    What's going on with {plotly}? The R package has 600+ open issues on GitHub, many of them bugs that were reported 5+ years ago and still aren't fixed. Just ran into two of those bugs trying to make a simple line + ribbon plot and only one has a workaround. How are they funded? Is anyone working on these bugs?

    milesmcbain,
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    @LeafyEricScott the company that paid to develop it went into competition with RStudio/Posit, and the primary R developer went to work at RStudio/Posit. A rift has opened up and the R package has fallen in.

    teunbrand, to random
    @teunbrand@fosstodon.org avatar

    folks who switched from notebook/rmd/qmd oriented workflows to {targets}, how did you transition? Do you just precompute files with {targets} and then use these in your notebooks? Is rendering a notebook in itself a target? How do you do EDA now versus then?
    I find it hard to adapt my analysis mindset to the targets framework

    milesmcbain,
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    @teunbrand @njtierney similar to others I sometimes employ a ./discovery folder where I muck around in scripts or notebooks if I am very uncertain of how to proceed. But usually these are quite short.

    Another trick is to create an anonymous function at the bottom of a target function file to work as your ‘scratch pad’. Since it has no binding it never contaminates your environment.

    milesmcbain,
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    @teunbrand @njtierney once you become fluent in targets you don’t actually like doing much work outside it because you move too slowly. It seems like less work to skip for a quick investigation until you’re stumbling over stale state creating weird results, and wasting time tracking down phantom bugs. So then you’re restarting your R session from scratch numerous times and rerunning your code from scratch and then you swear to yourself just to use targets from the start next time.

    milesmcbain,
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    @teunbrand @njtierney I made some stuff to help me go faster. You may enjoy: {tflow}, {fnmate}

    Andres4NY, to cycling
    @Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it avatar

    Me, checking to see if my has even the slightest hint of horizonal drop-outs that would make installing an internal gear hub easier:

    "Fuck."

    milesmcbain,
    @milesmcbain@fosstodon.org avatar

    @Andres4NY not sure if your cargo is electric or not, but we’re currently renting a Tern HSD in addition to our main and the advice to “pedal lightly when shifting” is easier said than done when a pedal assist is adding force on top of yours through the drive train. I’ve ridden a IGH for years on a pushy so do know the drill, but my instincts for getting a clean shift on the electric + IGH are all wrong. I find frequent crunchy shifts a sore spot on an otherwise solid bike.

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