A new year, a new blog, and some reflections on the past year

There was not much blogging going on in 2022 or 2023. Things are busy and I have not have much energy for blogging with all the other things going on. But its a new year, and I’d like to go into the new year with some new intentions, and reflections of the year that has passed.

Work

Work has been filled with a lot of grant applications, a lot of politicing, many ups and downs. I’d prefer to focus on the ups, because they include some really developments for my career and what I want to do.

Core facility

Firstly, I’m taking the lead for a new Core Facility at the University of Oslo. The Core facilities are mainly facilities for advanced equipment and expertise that is available for researchers at the university. The core facility I’m leading is called CAPRO, or The Capture and Processing of Lifescience data for the Humanities and Social sciences, and you can likely tell from the name, its not your standard advanced equipment facility. We rather focus on helping scientists with their projects with advanced data processing, management, and analysis, and by developing custom solutions for their needs. This is a really exciting opportunity for me, and I’m really looking forward to getting started. I have a great team, and I’m excited to see what we can accomplish.

We’ve already had a bit of a start with a project for the the Oslo Metropolitan University, which has been to run a series of workshops in R for their researchers.

Hub/Node

I also got funding from my university to establish a Hub/Node network, which is an initiative from University IT to facilitate exchange of knowledhe between University staff. Our network will focus on similar things as our core facility, but has some formal funding to be able to do so. In a sense, this funding enables our core facility to provide some services for free, which is really great for the researchers. We also establish a formal network with dScience which is at the faculty for natural sciences, and who deal particulalry with high performance computing aid. We hope a network with dScience will enable us to exchange valuable knowledge about HPC to social scientists, and provide synargies to how social scientists and natural scientists work.

Additionally, this funding enables us to work on a project I’ve been wanting to set up for a good while, a platform to run social science experiments online, while also enabling some particular data protection and privacy features. I have a project where I need to run online data collection, while also being able to connect data to Norwegian registry data. This means I cannot run an anonymous survey, but need to be able to link data to a person. This means currently tools for such data collection, like gorilla.sc or pavlovia are not gonna cut it for me. I know researchers at my University that want the same type of thing, and I am very excited to see this project come to life.

Posit::conf 2023

I’ve already written about my posit conf experience, and I won’t write more about that excellent trip and what I got from it. What I will write, is that the video of my talk is available on YouTube, if you want to know more about r-universe and how it made my R pacakage developer life better.

Volunteer work

I don’t do much volunteering, but when I do I try to make it count. I focus my time in the R community, and I have been doing some things I’m really proud of.

R-Ladies

I have been a member of the RLadies network for a while, and I have been a co-organizer of the Oslo chapter for a couple of years (which has been dormant since the pandemic). Stepping into the Board of Directorys for R-Ladies global, which technically happened in late 2022, but I’m counting it as a 2023 thing, has been a really great experience. I’m on the Board with 4 other amazing women, who are all really inspiring and great to work with. I’m learning so much from all of them, and I feel very proud of the direction we are steering R-Ladies in. I hope 2024 will be as great as 2023 was for R-Ladies.

rOpenSci

I did my first peer review for rOpenSci in 2023, and I’m really happy to be able to contribute to this amazing community. This also got me more involved in the rOpenSci community, and I’m really happy to be a part of it. There are some amazing people there, and I find the commuity to be a great source of knowledge, exchange and support. I keep learning new things almost daily by following the community discussions and reading blog posts.

In particular, this year I was a mentor in their Champions program, which was a great experience. My mentee, Caro Pradier, was an inspiration to work with, and it was an honor to be a guide on her package development journey.

I hosted and helped in a {targets} workshop with Joel Nitta, who I know through rOpenSci. We also co-wrote a blogpost for rOpenSci on the experience of doing that workshop, which you can read on rOpenSci’s blog.

And, I hosted one of their Social Coworking sessions, which was a lot of fun. I got to geek and connect with other R users and developers about the {cli} package.

R-Hub

And that further spiralled into a blogpost with Mäelle on r-hub about the {cli} package, which you can read here. The fact that Maëlle and I have not written a blogpost together before is a bit of a mystery, but I’m glad we finally did it!

New website

So here we are, starting a new year, and I have a new website. I’ve been wanting a revamp of my site for a while, with a brand new theme made all by myself. Most people who follow my blog will know I am deep in sunk-cost fallacy of Hugo, and I’m not moving away from that.

So, I have been working on this design for a little while now, and most will notice it carries over several elements from my original website, with some additions.

I decided to test out UIkit, which is a CSS framework, and I really like it. It’s feature rich and easy to work with, and gave me a lot of the elements I wanted for my site.

So here it is. The theme is called Hugo Igloo, and you can give it a go for your self if you want to. I have not documented it well yet, and there are still some bugs. But in general, its a nice theme, and I’m happy with it.

You can see more of its features on the demo website