Data science at 2DII: Onboarding to GitHub and RStudio

Mauro Lepore

At 2DII we use a particular workflow – a set of tools and practices. This post is about what you should know to work effectively with us, or whoever uses the same workflow.

Git workflows

We use two Git workflows – the GitHub flow, and the Gitflow workflow. If you use the Gitflow workflow you may want to use the git-flow extension.

Introduction to GitHub

We collaborate on GitHub. Whatever your experience with GitHub, you may like these resources:

What is GitHub? (4’ video).
Introduction to GitHub (1-2 h tutorial from GitHub Lab).

Join 2DII’s GitHub organization

[GitHub] Organizations are shared accounts where businesses and open-source projects can collaborate across many projects at once. Owners and administrators can manage member access to the organization’s data and projects with sophisticated security and administrative features. – About organizations

To join our GitHub organization you need to be invited by someone with special (“Owner”) privileges. Find that person by asking on the #coding channel on 2DII’s Slack and share your GitHub username.

Setup

Most of our code on GitHub is written in R and from RStudio. Here is how to set things up:

Setup (instructions; 20’ video). If you are already set, use this guide to confirm we are all set in the same way.
How to contribute to GitHub from the terminal and from RStudio (35’ video)¹.

Why Git, and how it relates to GitHub and RStudio

Git is the heart of GitHub. We use it to track each meaningful change in our projects. You may use Git from the terminal or from a dedicated program (e.g. GitKraken); but you rarely need anything special because the most useful features of Git are available directly from RStudio.

Git handbook (10’ read).
Git cheat sheets.
Collaboration and time travel- version control with git, github and RStudio (50’ video).

We are working on multiple projects you may want to know about:

ds-incubator: Weekly meetups to share best practices.
resources: A place to explore and share resources.
coding-helpdesk: Live support by appointment.
r2dii: A collection of R packages we maintain.
dev-hangout: Weekly discussion of wider coding related topics.

What else (or less) do you think a successful onboarding should have?

Caveat: In this video I violate the GitHub flow in that I submit a pull request not from a feature branch (as I should) but from the master branch.↩

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Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Lepore (2020, June 23). Data science at 2DII: Onboarding to GitHub and RStudio. Retrieved from https://2degreesinvesting.github.io/posts/2020-06-23-github-and-rstudio/

BibTeX citation

@misc{lepore2020onboarding,
  author = {Lepore, Mauro},
  title = {Data science at 2DII: Onboarding to GitHub and RStudio},
  url = {https://2degreesinvesting.github.io/posts/2020-06-23-github-and-rstudio/},
  year = {2020}
}

Onboarding to GitHub and RStudio