Noam Ross is a research software engineer and data scientist writing about open-source software, reproducible research, and the ethics of technology. His blog explores tooling choices, CI/CD workflows, and the social impact of software in scientific work.
36 articles from this blog
A guide to setting up a self-hosted Git alternative using Gitea, prompted by ethical concerns over GitHub's ICE contract.
A guide to using GitLab CI with Docker and the Drake build system for reproducible, cached model-fitting pipelines.
A developer details the modern tech stack used to rebuild their personal website, including Hugo, blogdown, and CircleCI.
A technical article presenting a mathematical function for creating smooth, differentiable pulses, with R code examples.
A guide to getting started with Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) in R using the Lavaan package, based on a user group presentation.
A guide to visualizing and diagnosing Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs) in R, based on a presentation and blog post by Jaime Ashander.
A tutorial introducing the ggplot2 package for data visualization in R, presented at a user group meeting.
A tutorial on creating maps using R, based on a presentation by Ryan Peek and Michele Tobias at the Davis R Users' Group.
A tutorial on using ROpenSci packages to connect to and retrieve data from online scientific repositories.
Analyzing ESA conference abstracts using LDA topic modeling to identify scientific communities and trends through text-mining techniques.
Explains the advantages of vectorization in R for writing faster, simpler, and safer code by examining how R works internally.
A tutorial on handling dates and times in R, covering essential classes like Date and POSIXct, formatting, calculations, and sequences.
Explores applying equation-free modeling techniques to optimize control of complex ecological systems simulated by individual-based models.
A technical tutorial on formatting ggplot2 plots for scientific publication, including design adjustments and using Inkscape for final edits.
A guide to printing R help files directly in the console or within knitr documents using a custom function from the tools package.
A technical talk on using the bbmle package in R to perform Maximum Likelihood Estimation for fitting mechanistic ecological models.
A technical article proposing a null model to analyze age and multiple infection effects in Sudden Oak Death disease dynamics, using mathematical modeling.
A summary of Robert Hijmans' talk on spatial data analysis in R, covering packages like raster, dismo, and geosphere for geostatistics and visualization.
Introduces proftable(), an improved R profiling function that displays detailed call stacks and line numbers to identify performance bottlenecks.
A practical guide for R users on optimizing code for speed, balancing performance with readability and real-world time constraints.
