useR! 2024 Keynote:
How Your Code Might Get Rusty, And What You Can Do About This
Maëlle Salmon, Cynkra & rOpenSci
Do you ever find yourself working on a codebase that has gotten a bit rusty over time? Or read an old script and have trouble understanding what it does?
It happens to me regularly, be it code that I wrote myself, or code I was tasked with, such as the established igraph R package. In this talk, I share some of my strategies to suffer less when renovating a codebase, as well as prevention ideas to make future renovations less likely, or easier.
I also discuss the human challenges of software maintenance, based on observations of the federation of maintainers that we try to nurture at rOpenSci.
Maëlle Salmon, with a PhD in statistics, is a Research Software Engineer and blogger. At rOpenSci, she maintains the guide “rOpenSci Packages: Development, Maintenance, and Peer Review,” and has developed the babeldown and babelquarto packages for multilingual documents. At cynkra, she contributes to the fledge and igraph packages. Maëlle is also the co-author of the book “HTTP testing in R” with Scott Chamberlain and manages the R-hub blog. Additionally, she regularly contracts with various organizations, including research institutions, for R package development. Maëlle is a member of the R-Ladies Global team.