R Project Management

This repo contains materials and resources for a 1-day course in project management in R. It is a quarto website, and as such adhered to basic quarto conventions.

• slides contains the slides for the course
• sections contains the child quarto sections reused in the materials
• _quarto.yaml contains the quarto configuration for the course
• index.qmd contains the course homepage

The repo uses renv to manage package dependencies. To install the packages used in this course, run renv::restore() from the project root.

As researchers grow in their skills, eventually the infrastructure surrounding the analysis will become an important catalyst for the reproducibility and longevity of analysis artefacts. Researchers are capable of creating complex and impressive projects, but it is unlikely to have benefited from any formal training or mentorship related to topics regarding project management. As a result of this, reproducibility and longevity of projects are likely to suffer. Learning aspects of project management is a vital, but rarely taught, skill when working on a project. While project management has some general guidelines that traverse fields, there are specific aspects to think about when working R, given R’s idiosyncrasies.

Aims

• Understand what a working environment is and how R deals with them

• Successfully implement a project-oriented workflow

• Understand best-practice naming of files

• Know how to practice safe paths from R

• Understand basics of R package management

Schedule ¹

Saving source and blank slates	1 hour
Project-oriented workflow	1 hour
How to name files & practicing safe paths	1 hour
Lunch break	30 minutes
R package management	1.5 hours

Preparations

You might already have R and RStudio installed on your system. We highly recommend updating both of them to the latest version before the workshop, to ensure you can follow along all the exercises.

Install summary

• install/update R

• install/update RStudio

A new version of RStudio and R is recommended. Even if you have R and RStudio installed on your system, you should update all them before the workshop if you installed them longer than 2 months ago.

R packages

In addition to R and RStudio, a series of R packages will also be needed to complete the workshop tasks.

# Run in R
install.packages(c(
  "remotes",      # installing packages from GitHub
  "rmarkdown",    # rendering reports
  "fs",           # file system operations
  "here",         # navigating paths
  "usethis",      # for course materials
  "tidyverse"     # data-wrangling
))

Resources

• Workshop website: https://www.capro.dev/workshop_rproj/
• What They Forgot to Teach you about R
• Happy Git With R book

Footnotes

1. This course relies heavily on materials from What They Forgot to Teach you about R, which is an excellent resource to dig deeper into to improve the way you work in R. ↩