First R Base Contribution
Excited about our first RCONIS contribution to R Base Code! 🚀
How did this happen? 👇
As part of this year’s UseR! conference, Daniel had been accepted as a participant to the R Dev Day taking place the day after the conference closure.
“After almost 20 years of being an R user, it is great to finally give back - not only via R packages, but via direct contributions to base R. 💻
Thanks to the fantastic organization by Heather Turner and Shannon Pileggi, PhD, we had been well prepared with learning resources (in particular I enjoyed the video tutorial by Gabriel Becker and Martin Mächler). In particular, I had managed to compile R from source on my Windows laptop for the first time as a prerequisite a few days before.
On the R Dev Day, the Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg room was packed with participants including R core members (Peter Dalgaard, Tomas Kalibera, Michael Lawrence, Martin Mächler, Sebastian Meyer, Paul Murrell, Luke Tierney, Simon Urbanek) and long time R experts (including Hadley Wickham e.g.). We directly jumped to selecting an issue from the GitHub repository and I picked a feature request that had support from R Core developer Paul Murrell, because I sat close to him and because it seemed fun (adapting both R and C code as well as documentation, and having a graphics output as a rewarding outcome). 📉
And everybody started diving into the issues and started hacking! 👩💻
It was great to have Paul near by, and I quickly made progress. By lunch time, the feature was working on my edited R-devel! I also got help from George Stagg and discussed with Sebastian Meyer. By the end of the afternoon, I had posted my progress on the GitHub issue. Paul had a few more questions and review requests, and I posted further updates on GitHub. Finally yesterday, Paul could successfully commit this to the R-devel sources on SVN (see the screenshot from the logs). 🤓
I think this event was awesome, and I congratulate the R Contribution Working Group, in particular Heather Turner who is chairing the group, for opening up R base development to new contributors so successfully and inclusively! 🚀 Thanks a lot in particular to all R core members who took their precious time to attend the R Dev Day - without them it would not have been possible. 🙏”