File organization and naming are powerful weapons against chaos.
Dear past-Hadley: PLEASE COMMENT YOUR CODE BETTER. Love present-Hadley
The attached is similar to the code we used.
— anonymous
Your closest collaborator is you six months ago, but you don't reply to emails.
— @gonuke, after @kcranstn tweet quoting @mtholder
I will let the data speak for itself when it cleans itself.
If you can't make changes because you're afraid of breaking something, it's already broken.
— Kara Woo, via @franciscoyira@techhub.social toot
Never check data when you are hungry, thirsty, or tired.
— @GhazalGulati, via @AmeliaMN tweet
One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions.
— Grace Hopper, via @NMatasci tweet
Pick a license, any license.
If it hurts, do it more often.
— @martinfowler, via @JennyBryan tweet
You won’t write tests, because they feel like make work, and then you’ll make yourself very sad, and so you’ll start writing tests. As far as I can tell, everyone does this.
Installation/setup/whatever is always harder and much more poorly documented than mere usage.
Open source isn’t free like sunshine. It’s free like a puppy.
— @sarahnovotnoy, via @bridgetkromhout tweet
Thou shalt get only as creative with names as thy own skill with regular expressions.
The most important tool for Reproducible Research is the mindset, when starting, that the end product will be reproducible.
— Keith Baggerly, via @kwbroman tweet
Big Data: (n): the belief that a big enough pile of horseshit will, with probability one, somewhere contain a pony.
— @mlipsitch, via @callin_bull tweet
Working with data is not about rules to follow but about decisions to make.
— @naupakaz, via @kwbroman tweet
I'm not worried about being scooped, I'm worried about being ignored.
— @magnusnordborg, via @BaxterTwi tweet
needs more pvalue
Batch effects are important and they will bollocks you up.
— Keith Baggerly, via @kwbroman tweet
Classroom data are like teddy bears; real data are like a grizzly with salmon blood dripping out its mouth.
— @JennyBryan, via @sgrifter tweet
like asking how to extract chocolate from meatloaf
It's not that we don't test our code, it's that we don't store our tests so they can be re-run automatically.
— @hadleywickham, testthat article
If you use software that lacks automated tests, you are the tests.
and I’m still pretty sure some of the data is missing, but it could still be here, in this ONE HUNDRED SHEET excel file
Teach stats as you would cake baking: make a few before you delve into the theory of leavening agents.
— @JennyBryan tweet after Joan Strassmann blog post
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
— Attributed to Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut; often misattributed to Yogi Berra
The opposite of “open” isn’t “closed”. The opposite of “open” is “broken”.
— John Wilbanks, "The unreasonable effectiveness of open data" (pdf slides)
Let's start the "titanic data" movement. Data too big to fail.
— @neilfws with assist from @aaronquinlan, tweet
Behind every wildly successful tool there’s probably a very powerful abstraction.
R is a datasmith's heaven-on-earth; I like Python, long term relationship with Excel, quite like Power Query, DAX's a keeper, but I love R.
Data cleaning code cannot be clean. It's a sort of sin eater.
Well begun is half done.
— Attributed to Aristotle and Mary Poppins
You shouldn't feel ashamed about your code - if it solves the problem, it's perfect just the way it is. But also, it could always be better.
— @hadleywickham, via @allimoberger tweet
Last week I told a collaborator to stick the files on a USB drive and walk the 100m across the road rather than figure out inter-institute file sharing.
I don't want it perfect. I want it Thursday.
— I. Jack Good, via @SherlockPHolmes, via @kwbroman tweet
Le mieux est l’enemi du bien (Perfect is the enemy of good)
— Voltaire, via @SherlockPHolmes
The usethis package implements this important principle: Automate that which can be automated. Your computer was literally born to implement rote-but-fussy stuff for you.
Of course someone has to write loops. It doesn’t have to be you.
that moment when you feel a small surge of satisfaction that something has gone right is the moment to commit
the message says why you're happy