I’ve been spending my summer interning with the tidymodels team at RStudio. Amid all of the instability recently, due both to the pandemic and much-needed surge in engagement with racial justice efforts in the U.S., I’ve been especially grateful for reliable and meaningful work. The internship has involved all of the package development I had hoped for plus so much more.
broom
I spent the first half of my summer working on broom, an R package that supplies functions to convert models and other statistical objects to tidy tibbles. Familiarizing myself with the codebase was definitely a challenge: the broom package is much larger, has so much more history, and is so much more widely used than any package I’ve worked on before. I’m grateful that RStudio 1.3’s global search and replace came just in time for my internship start date!😅
With the help of over 100 new contributors since the last major release, broom 0.7.0 will soon be on CRAN: you’ll be able to read a bit more about it on the tidyverse blog once it’s released.
Model Stacking
With the new release of broom wrapping up, I’m transitioning to my second project: a grammar for model stacking that aligns with the existing tidymodels framework. This functionality was consistently one of the highest-ranked requests in the recent tidymodels community survey, so it’s been really neat to be working on what seems to be a high priority for tidymodels users.
I’ve been very thankful for fellow intern Ezgi’s recent work on learning and teaching tidymodels as I’ve familiarized myself with parsnip, tune, dials, and recipes. The API and implementation are still very much in their developmental stages, but I’m excited to share more about this work as it starts to take shape.
The Big Picture
This internship has meant much more to me than just my projects, though. For one, interns had the opportunity to take part in the RStudio instructor certification program. It was unlike any learning experience I’ve had before, and I’m really excited to get started applying what I learned while leading R and tidyverse workshops soon.
Spending time with so many of my professional idols has been great too: learning from them while also having my input taken seriously has felt really meaningful. (Our shared appreciation for emojis has been helpful in connecting, too.☀️) It’s also been really inspiring to talk with other interns and follow along with their projects. Each of their skillsets are so impressive and different from my own.
I’m genuinely grateful for the opportunity to be interning with RStudio, and I’m excited to see what the second half of the summer brings!🐛