6 Maintaining an open source package in R

Again, Hilary and Jenny have created more and better instructions on installing a package locally and from Github, so I won’t repeat what’s already been done.

But once I pushed this to Github, I immediately became an open source developer and maintainer. That’s all it takes. Folks saw it on Twitter, got a good chuckle, and immediately started using it, fixing bugs and typos, and offering suggestions for the next version.

This is the thing I didn’t realize before building this package. When you make something open source, and put it out into the world, people will often just start fixing things for you, for free. I got lucky with BRRR - apparently, the Venn diagram overlap between rap nerds and stats nerds is much larger than I thought, and more people saw this package than I ever imagined. But this is the beauty of open source - projects become bigger, better, and more creative than they ever could if they live and die on one person’s computer. Four people have fixed bugs or typos in my repo, which I in turn built off the back of Rasmus’s. Someone has already ported beepr into Python. The community shared beepr with friends and colleagues they thought would like it.

Hopefully, someone else who has never made a package will take this and run with it, remixing the remix until it is unrecognizable. In the wise words of the Godfather of my very first R package: