At various times in my life I have released code into the wild, usually on purpose. Sometimes that code is reused by other people, often unpredictably. Case in point: the most widely-used code I have ever written appears in Appendix C to an obscure paper on the computation of first passage to absorbtion times for Weiner diffusion processes. The original manuscript is here and you need to scroll down to page 19 to find it. The code is written in MATLAB syntax and ā just to make things worse ā thereās a bug in code. If you take the code at face value it simply doesnāt work. Nevertheless, some versions of this code have found their way into an astonishing range of scientific software tools. This one silly little snippet, barely more than a github gist, turns out to be the most contagiously viral bit of code Iāve ever written. But it doesnāt have a github repo, it doesnāt have a website, and thereās no mechanism to invoke it directly. It just happened to be useful, and people used it. With that in mind, here is a incomplete and idiosyncratic list of some things Iāve done with code. Some of it is good, some of it isnāt. Life is like that.
ertte
Work in progress package that provides a convenience layer for exposure-response time-to-event models
erplots
Work in progress package that provides a model agnostic plotting framework for exposure-response plots
erglm
Work in progress package that provides a convenience layer for exposure-response models that fall within the generalized linear model
emaxnls
Inspired by the BayesERtools and rstanemax packages Iāve worked on with Kenta Yoshida, I started thinking about what a lightweight frequentist (yes, frequentist. sue me) tool for Emax regression in R would look like. This was what happened.
sessioncheck
Simple tools for checking the state of the R session. Early-stage package, intended as a drop-in replacement for the heuristic method of using rm() to clear the global environment at the top of a script; aimed at intermediate-level R users that may not be ready for advanced session management tools
quartose
Syntactic sugar for quarto. An early-stage package providing some tools for working with quarto programmatically. It was originally a personal-use package, but people have expressed some interest in using it so Iāve now sent it to CRAN. I like this one enough that I intend to maintain it properly, but I suspect development will be slow given life constraints.
arttools
Tools for managing generative art workflows. Again, this one is very much designed around my own needs. Itās reasonably well documented and other folks are free to use it, but itās not intended for CRAN.
flametree
A fun R package for generative art. It makes cute little cartoon trees using iterated function systems. Thatās all it does, but I like it. In retrospect I donāt know why I sent it to CRAN butā¦ itās there and itās not creating problems soā¦ cool.
lsr
The first R package I ever wrote, designed to suport a statistics textbook that is a little outdated. Surprisingly it all still seems to work as intended. So thatās something.