Things I Like
Tools, people, and resources I use and recommend.
Software
Files and folders
Scans entire directories, folders and subfolders, and shows a treemap of where files are taking up space, among other things. I used to recommend TreeSize Free, but WizTree is faster and doesn’t push the paid version as much.
Path Length Checker deadlydog on GitHub
A stand-alone app that lists the path and length of every file and directory in a folder. Handy for tracking down Windows paths that are too long for some programs to handle.
File and folder comparison: versions by date or folder, folder structure, and line-level differences in text files. It also syncs one folder to another.
Unzips files, with more options than the standard Windows unzip. Handy.
Windows utilities and automation
PowerToys Microsoft
Handy Windows utilities, e.g. Find My Mouse, Workspaces, PowerRename, and the Command Palette.
Automates keystrokes and repetitive tasks on Windows.
Text and writing
My favorite text editor, with so many fun tools.
A Markdown editor built for academic writing, with citation support.
Research and reading
Free reference manager for collecting, organizing, and citing sources.
Free ebook reader and library manager.
Open-source optical character recognition: turns images and scanned pages into text.
Free desktop tool to split, merge, and rearrange PDF pages.
Data science and publishing
Publishing system for documents, slides, and websites. This site is built with it.
Free, open-source tool for cleaning and transforming messy data. The cleaning steps can be exported and reapplied.
Free diagram and flowchart editor.
R packages
People to follow
Research data management consultant and author of Data Management in Large-Scale Education Research.
R developer at Posit; co-author of R Packages and Happy Git and GitHub for the useR.
Developer of knitr, bookdown, blogdown, and TinyTeX.
Biostatistician whose blog, Statistical Thinking, covers statistical methods and practice.
Metascientist who writes about statistical inference and research methods.
Communities
Posit Data Science Hangout Posit
Free weekly online conversation with data science leaders.
Posit Data Science Lab Posit
Weekly live-coding and screen-sharing session. Drop in or just watch.
Community and infrastructure for open, reproducible research software in R.
A weekly dataset for practicing data wrangling and visualization.
Websites and resources
Searchable index of R package documentation from CRAN, Bioconductor, GitHub, and R-Forge.
Beginner-friendly R tutorials, a free book, and a YouTube channel.
Builds data management plans from funder templates.
Hundreds of R chart examples with code.
Draw a symbol to find its Unicode character.
Books, podcasts, and courses
Data Management in Large-Scale Education Research Crystal Lewis
Free online book covering the research data management life cycle.
R for Data Science (2e) Hadley Wickham, Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, and Garrett Grolemund
Free online book on doing data science with the tidyverse.
R Packages (2e) Hadley Wickham and Jennifer Bryan
Free online book on building R packages.
Mastering Shiny Hadley Wickham
Free online book on building interactive web apps in R.
Fundamentals of Data Visualization Claus O. Wilke
Free online book on making clear, accurate figures.
The free official Git book.
Open lessons on the shell, Git, R, and Python for researchers.