Bringing analysts and technical writers together through internal packages
A talk at Cascadia R 2021
About the conference
Cascadia R is a regional R conference serving the Pacific Northwest. In 2021, the event took place online on June 4 and 5. I had the opportunity to reflect on my experience at the Office of the Provincial Health Officer in British Columbia through a five-minute lightning talk.
What I presented
This abstract has been edited for conciseness
Restructuring frequently used code snippets into well-organized internal packages is easier said than done. In this presentation, we discuss how to address challenges that are less explored compared to the technical aspects of the development process. How do you find out what your team truly needs? And once the package is complete, how do you encourage colleagues to adopt it?
We answer these questions through a case study reflecting on our team’s experience creating a ggplot2 extension to match the organization’s existing style guide for healthcare utilization reports. This package streamlines plot formatting, allowing analysts to focus on identifying trends in the data to share with technical writers, thereby fostering more efficient collaboration between the two groups.