February 2024

tada ⬢ science is.

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We’ll get to what it is and what it does soon enough, but it is, it exists as a company, where as before it was just a name I used. We might start to we more than we I as a consequence, but for now let me wrap what happened in february.

AI poetry

We started off by adding the tada::verse() function to generate praise poetry using ChatGPT through the chattr 📦.

This was fun, but quickly opened a can of worms, because tada::verse() would not work for some packages, because of a bug in chattr . At least that’s what I initially assumed, and logged an issue for it.

chattr is not a trivial package, and so I went on a little debugging quest to find out what the problem was, and developed snitch along the way to help with tracing. snitch has helped, but it is still a little clunky, so it will stay unreleased until it is somewhat better, or just sit in the unreleased 📦 graveyard.

turned out the underlying problem was a missed opportunity in httr2 , which was the perfect excuse to dive in, learn about httr2 and eventually settle with a proposal to add a round= argument to httr2::req_perform_stream() . It has been great working on this with Hadley on the pull request. I sure was easier that we have a lot of experience working together, but I believe we both contributed to the vision and ended up with a simple, nice and extensible way to solve the initial problem. Long story short, when you stream text with httr2::req_perform_stream() , you just do httr2::req_perform_stream(round = "line").

For valentine we went a different way to engage with ChatGPT and simply use the openai package instead of chattr . That loses sreaming along the way, but that’s fine. Now that httr2::req_perform_stream() is more resilient, we can imagine to contribute a streaming feature to openai . Similarly, we might switch to using Gemini and contribute to gemini.R or develop a mistral.ai package to use Mistral instead. valentine was fun to play with.

react

react is a different beast, it was initially meant as a goofy 📦 but it git some engagement on various socials, so it might have more potential than initially envisionned, or maybe this is just because it’s a shiny ✨ thing .

link

Because February was a slow month, I ended up with some available bandwidth, and decided to time block feb 23 to learn about and initiate contributions to the pharmaverse. I’m coming to this with extensive experience in a different verse, but because the pharma⬡verse is not a trivial collection of packages, I approached the day by initiating a conversation on the slack to collect ideas on how to best allocate my time. I was lucky enough to get ideas from the community, and I look forward to do more in depth pharma⬡verse work in the future.

However, the day quickly evolved to crafting the link package that is designed to help with automatically generate links to packages and functions in your quarto/Rmarkdown posts, i.e. these links are generated automatically: link and dplyr::across() . Kudos to the downlit package that does most of the heavy lifting.

I like that throughout the day, the solution got more and more generic, to the point that link eventually is not pharma⬡verse specific, but rather a general tool to help with blogging … It might be interesting to go further in generality and include the feature automatically in quarto. To be continued.

duckdb

Last month, I started working with cynkra on a duckdb extension 🦆 that will eventually contribute to duckplyr . duckplyr is a dplyr replacement built natively on top of duckdb , that’s 😎. I look forward to contribute more to this. If you’re curious about it, the best place is this posit::conf talk from Kirill.

To be continued

That’s a wrap for this wrapup, March will look different for tada ⬢ science, but the dedication to R is intact.