Category: Work

Reflections on five years of the janitor R package

Post author By Sam
Post date March 13, 2021
1 Comment on Reflections on five years of the janitor R package

One thing led to another. In early 2016, I was participating in discussions on the #rstats Twitter hashtag, a community for users of the R programming language. There, Andrew Martin and I met and realized we were both R users working in K-12 education. That chance interaction led to me attending a meeting of education data users that April in NYC.

Going through security at LaGuardia for my return flight, I chatted with Chris Haid about data science and R. Chris affirmed that I’d earned the right to call myself a “data scientist.” He also suggested that writing an R package wasn’t anything especially difficult.

My plane home that night was hours late. Fired up and with unexpected free time on my hands, I took a few little helper functions I’d written for data cleaning in R and made my initial commits in assembling them into my first software package, janitor, following Hilary Parker’s how-to guide.

That October, the janitor package was accepted to CRAN, the official public repository of R packages. I celebrated and set a goal of someday attaining 10,000 downloads.

Yesterday janitor logged its one millionth download, wildly exceeding my expectations. I thought I’d take this occasion to crunch some usage numbers and write some reflections. This post is sort of a baby book for the project, almost five years in.

By The Numbers

This chart shows daily downloads since the package’s first CRAN release. The upper line (red) is weekdays, the lower line (green) is weekends. Each vertical line represents a new version published on CRAN.

From the very beginning I was excited to have users, but this chart makes that exciting early usage seem miniscule. janitor’s most substantive updates were published in March 2018, April 2019, and April 2020, with it feeling more done each time, but most user adoption has occurred more recently than that. I guess I didn’t have to worry so much about breaking changes.

Another way to look at the growth is year-over-year downloads:

Year	Downloads	Ratio vs. Prior Year
2016-17	13,284	–
2017-18	47,304	3.56x
2018-19	161,411	3.41x
2019-20	397,390	2.46x
2020-21 (~5 months)	383,5956	–

Download counts are from the RStudio mirror, which does not represent all R user activity. That said, it’s the only available count and the standard measure of usage.

Tags foss, janitor, package development, self-congratulatory

#rstats Making Work

That feeling when your first user opens an issue

Post author By Sam
Post date November 18, 2019
No Comments on That feeling when your first user opens an issue

You know how new businesses frame the first dollar they earn?

I wrote an R package that interfaces with the SurveyMonkey API. I worked hard on it, on and off the clock, and it has a few subtle features of which I’m quite proud. It’s paying off, as my colleagues at TNTP have been using it to fetch and analyze their survey results.

The company and I open-sourced the project, deciding that if we have already invested the work, others might as well benefit. And maybe some indirect benefits will accrue to the company as a result. I made the package repository public, advertised it in a few places, then waited. Like a new store opening its doors and waiting for that first customer.

They showed up on Friday! With the project’s first GitHub star and a bug report that was good enough for me to quickly patch the problem. Others may have already been quietly using the package, but this was the first confirmed proof of use. It’s a great feeling as an open-source developer wondering, “I built it: will they come?”

Consider this blog post to be me framing that dollar.

Tags foss, software development, surveymonkey

DIY Work

Measuring CO2 accumulation during phone meetings

Post author By Sam
Post date August 22, 2019
2 Comments on Measuring CO2 accumulation during phone meetings

I am part of the remote co-working community Workantile, in downtown Ann Arbor. We have small private rooms for taking conference calls and I often find them stuffy and notice I’m tired by the end of a meeting. I’d read that excessive CO2 build-up in meetings can impair cognitive function. Was that the case, or was I just bored from the meetings?

I borrowed an Indoor Air Quality Meter from my amazing local library (by Sper Scientific, normally $400, for me, $0) and went to find out.

Work

Fully-remote jobs don’t need in-person interviews

Post author By Sam
Post date October 4, 2018
No Comments on Fully-remote jobs don’t need in-person interviews

I hired a data analyst last year who started working for me in December. He lives in Colorado, I live in Michigan. After 10 months of working together, week in and week out, I finally “met” him at our annual company conference last month (September). Does that seem funny? I was surprised by how tall he was, but otherwise, no, it’s business as usual around here.

I’ve now embraced the idea of hiring someone and working with them without first meeting them in person. If you’ll be working with them remotely, and your team and organization have the right culture and systems in place for that, why would you insist on in-person interviews?

In a truly remote-first organization, there’s little cause to fly someone out for an in-person interview. And there are many reasons not to. When you weigh the costs and benefits, it’s not worth it. You’re a remote organization – embrace it!