useR! 2024 Keynote:

How Your Code Might Get Rusty, And What You Can Do About This

Maëlle Salmon, Cynkra & rOpenSci

Do you ever find yourself working on a codebase that has gotten a bit rusty over time? Or read an old script and have trouble understanding what it does?

It happens to me regularly, be it code that I wrote myself, or code I was tasked with, such as the established igraph R package. In this talk, I share some of my strategies to suffer less when renovating a codebase, as well as prevention ideas to make future renovations less likely, or easier.
I also discuss the human challenges of software maintenance, based on observations of the federation of maintainers that we try to nurture at rOpenSci.

Maëlle Salmon, with a PhD in statistics, is a Research Software Engineer and blogger. At rOpenSci, she maintains the guide “rOpenSci Packages: Development, Maintenance, and Peer Review,” and has developed the babeldown and babelquarto packages for multilingual documents. At cynkra, she contributes to the fledge and igraph packages. Maëlle is also the coauthor of the book “HTTP testing in R” with Scott Chamberlain and manages the Rhub blog. Additionally, she regularly contracts with various organizations, including research institutions, for R package development. Maëlle is a member of the RLadies Global team.