Blog – Nic Crane

Also available on R-bloggers.

Building Go Tools Without Writing Any Go

AI

I’m a pretty heavy user of AI in my day-to-day open source maintenance, but with a lot of care and caveats. Generating code is easy, but the challenge these days lies in…

Rapid Learning Skill for Code

AI

R

I posted last year about using AI to help me learn. I had read a paper that suggested how ChatGPT could help with learning, based on a framework of self-directed learning…

My Strategies for Using AI to Contribute to Open Source

AI

Open Source

AI is making it easier than ever to contribute to open source projects, and this has amazing potential for people to learn and projects to expand the pool of folks who can…

Introduction to Parquet

R

Arrow

Data Engineering

Today I was on Posit’s DS Lab talking about Parquet! In this blog post, I’ve included the notes I wrote to prep for the session, which cover a lot of what we talked about…

How I Used Claude Code to Implement {dplyr} Functions in {arrow}

AI

R

Arrow

In this blog post, I explain how I used Claude Code to implement bindings to new dplyr functions in the Arrow R package.

LLM-Assisted Issue Triage for Open Source Maintainers

R

LLMs

In this post, I demonstrate how simple LLM tools can be used for open source issue triage.

AI Tooling and Open Source

AI

As one of the maintainers of Apache Arrow, lately I’ve been noticing an increase in AI-generated pull requests. In this blog post, I discuss how AI tooling affects open…

Using ChatGPT as a Code Tutor: A One-Hour Learning Experiment

R

AI

There’s a lot of advice out there at the moment about using LLMs for code generation, but something I’ve been curious about is using LLMs for learning around code.

Iterating on an app to create social media posts generating package using {shiny} and {ellmer}

R

AI

I recently posted about a repo I created containing a Shiny app which allows users to generate social media posts to promote blog posts, using {shiny} and {ellmer}.

Generating social media posts to promote blog posts with {shiny} and {ellmer}

R

AI

Writing blog posts is fun, but the next step, getting people to actually read them, can be trickier. I wanted to promote a recent blog post I co-authored for R-Ladies, but…

Monitoring R Package Updates with Github Actions

R

GitHub Actions

As maintainer of the Arrow R package, there are a few packages I want to keep up to date with, so I can make sure that our bindings continue to be compatible with the latest…

Debugging

R

As a package maintainer, I’m a little disappointed when folks mention Arrow bugs they’re aware of but haven’t reported. Not disappointed with the individual in question, but…

Three Goats in a Raincoat

R

I am not a fan of the term “imposter syndrome.” It’s a lazy way of ignoring the complex and interconnected, often structural reasons that contribute to many people’s…

Type inference in readr and arrow

R

Arrow

The CSV format is widely used in data science, and at its best works well as a simple human-readable format that is widely known and understood. The simplicity of CSVs…

Arrow New Feature Showcase: `show_exec_plan()`

R

Arrow

The arrow package allows you to take advantage of the power of the Acero execution engine for data manipulation and analysis. The code in arrow provides bindings to dplyr ver…

Customising pkgdown with a version selector

R

One of the things I’ve been working on lately is implementing a version selector for the Arrow pkgdown site, so that users can browse to previous versions of the…

Error chaining

R

In this post, I’m going to talk about error chaining - overriding default error messages to add further hints for a user. I had a need to learn this while working on Arrow…

Open Source Developer Apprenticeship - 9 months in

R

Arrow

Career

I’ve been meaning to blog for ages but have been so wrapped up in project things and getting nerd-sniped. Here’s a bit about the last six months.

R package documentation - what makes a good example?

R

Python

I’m currently working on adding to the documentation of the arrow R package, and I’ve started thinking about the qualities of good examples. Specifically, I’m referring to…

R package documentation - what makes a good example?

R

I’m currently working on adding to the documentation of the arrow R package, and I’ve started thinking about the qualities of good examples. Specifically, I’m referring to…

My First Month at Ursa Computing

R

Arrow

Career

I’ve now been working at Ursa Computing on Apache Arrow for just over a month, and thought it would be a good time to write a blog post about my experiences over the past…

Why is eval parse bad?

R

I was writing Arrow bindings for na.omit and needed a way of applying is.na to every column of a table at once. I’d originally implemented using dplyr::filter, but had…

Three Valued Logic

R

This week I was writing Arrow bindings for some R functions and came across a concept that was new to me: three-valued logic.

Ten Steps to Becoming a Tidyverse Contributor

R

This year has been a crazy whirlwind for me – I moved job once, moved house 3 times, co-authored a course on Data Camp, got invited by a former colleague to assist with a…

Scraping rstudio::conf 2018 Abstracts

R

RStudio Conference 2019 takes place in January 2019, and this week RStudio put out a call for contributed talks and e-posters. Though I was eager to browse previous years’…

Comparing R packages using packagemetrics

R

A colleague asked for my opinion on 2 packages; loggit and futile.logger. Whilst I have used futile.logger before, I hadn’t used loggit and so used the metrics of the…

Pop-up to confirm action in Shiny

R

Shiny

It’s a gorgeous evening in Bath tonight, and my evening has been improved by finding a free table outside at the pub, a large glass of Sauvignon Blanc, and working out how…

Getting started with Leaflet in Shiny - interactive map apps

R

Shiny

Lately I’ve been enjoying learning how to use Shiny, and experimenting with making a fairly basic app, and wanted to develop my skills further. I’d been looking at an…