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Category Archives: Stack Overflow

SODD — StackOverflow Driven-Development

I occasionally hang out on StackOverflow and often use an answer as an opportunity to fill a package void for a particular need. docxtractr and qrencoder are two (of many) packages that were birthed from SO answers. I usually try to answer with inline code first then expand the functionality into a package (if warranted). Some make it to CRAN (like those two), others stay on GitHub.

This (short) post is about two new ones: webhose? and pigeon?.

The webhose package is an API interface package to https://webhose.io/, which is an interesting service that scrapes the web & “dark web” and provides a short but handy API to retrieving the content using a fairly intuitive query language.

The pigeon package is a hastily-hacked-together wrapper around pgn-extract, a cross-platform utility written in C for working with chess game data in PGN format.

I’m not going to have any time to round out the corners on either of those packages but will gladly make time to help anyone who wants to jump on board to either (or both!) of them.

Working on either package will let you get your feet wet (or, wetter) with R package development. They both need:

  • more functions + docs!
  • test harness setup
  • Travis-CI, code coverage & AppVeyor configs

Working on webhose will give you experience dealing with HTTP APIs (and their API is super clean to work with) and possibly introduce you to an area of research you’re not already in.

Working on pigeon will give you experience integrating C[++] & R code (and the C-library I’ve hack-wrapped definitely needs some care & feeding to ensure no memory leaks are present).

Neither is “mission critical”. The world will gladly go on w/o either of them. But, if you wanted a judgement-free place to hone your R package skills or try/learn new things (and ask questions along the way), file an issue, drop a note in the comments or hit me up on Twitter. If you’re an experienced R package-r and want to “own” either of these, that’s ? as well!

I’d encourage all nascent R coders to adopt “SODD” and use SO as a place to hone your skills while you help others (and you don’t need to write a package for every answer :-).

Three New #rstats Twitter Bots To Follow

I engage with the Stack[Overflow|Exchange] community quite a bit and was super-happy @treycausey made the [Stack Overflow bot](https://twitter.com/StackOverflowR) (@StackOverflowR) since I’m also on Twitter alot (mostly hanging out in these days).

However, questions exist in other Stack watering holes, like the [Geographic Information Systems Stack Exchange](http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r). [Cross Validated](http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r) and the fledgling [Data Science Stack Exchange](http://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/r). They are all easy enough to follow in your favorite RSS reader (which _is_ @feedly, _right_?), but it’s also equally as easy to turn them into Twitter bots (here they are):

– @DataSciSERBot (Data Science Stack Exchange posts)
– @GISStackExchR (Geographic Information Systems posts)
– @RStatsStExBot (Cross Validated Stack Exchange posts)

They use [this IFTTT recipe](https://ifttt.com/recipes/322136-twitter-bot-for-data-science-stack-exchange-rstats-questions) to take the RSS feeds from each Stack community and turn them into tweets. Each forum (and, hence, Twitter bot) has _way_ less volume than @StackOverflowR and also tend to be of less general interest than @StackOverflowR. However, each specialized question forums [usually] have _really_ interesting problems & answers that I’ve learned a great deal from. You may get inspiration for a solution to something, see a really neat way to accomplish a task, get an idea for a new R package or just gain new and useful knowledge in areas previously unfamiliar to you.

They won’t be spamming the Twitter channel (the errant tag on one of the tweets was fixed in the recipe), so you’ll have to follow them or deliberately check in on them to see the updates.

I’ll try to keep an eye out for other Stack communities that feature and add them to the bot family. If you see any I’ve missed or am missing in the future, drop a comment here or note to @hrbrmstr on Twitter.