GitHub
Sonia’s journey…
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018 November Viva
2019
2020 Covid-19
2021
Why did it take so long?
Umm…
- Git is scary?
- It’s a foreign language! branch, head, origin, blame, diff, fork?
- Git is for command line experts?
- What if I break the repo? and merge conflicts…
- Why is git useful?
- Time travel?
- I’m too busy?
- I’ve got stuff to do!
Why should you use git / GitHub?
1. Centralized cloud storage of your code
2. Version control system
2. Version control system
- Keep track of important versions
- Always have a working version
3. A single point of truth
- Latest version of code
- Previous versions of code (with changes)
- Data
- Project description
- Installation instructions
- Science / notes
- Discussion / ideas
- To do list / tasks
4. Reproducible research
- Makes your code / data available as a single project
- Makes your code / data citable
- Track changes
- Track what went wrong
4. Collaboration
5. Collaboration
Makes it easier to:
- collaborate
- share your code
- improve your code
Makes your project / data / code:
- easier to find
- easier to install
6. You might need to learn it eventually anyway
- Software developer
- Research software engineer
- Data science
And more?
- Automatically test your code
- Build websites
- Improve your code / learn new skills
- …
Let’s go back to 2014…
RStudio projects
Why use RStudio projects?
- Helps keep you organised!!!
- When you open a project
- a new R session is loaded
- the working directory is set to the project directory
.RData is loaded- .Rhistory is loaded
- previous tabs are left open
- other RStudio settings are loaded