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.
Browser extensions
Collapses all your open tabs into one list you can restore later, which clears the tab bar and frees memory.
Sends links and files between your computer and your phone, and mirrors phone notifications to the desktop.
Saves references and PDFs from a web page straight into Zotero from the browser toolbar.
Text and writing
My favorite text editor, with so many fun tools.
A Markdown editor built for academic writing, with citation support.
A Markdown editor that formats as you type, so the screen shows the finished document rather than the markup. Free and open source.
Research and reading
Free reference manager for collecting, organizing, and citing sources.
See also: Zotero Connector
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
Positron Posit
A free data science IDE purpose-built for Python and R, with a data explorer and AI assistance. Built on Code OSS, so VS Code extensions work in it too.
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
targets rOpenSci
Pipeline tool that skips steps that are already up to date, so reruns are faster and results stay in sync with code and data.
Builds file paths relative to the project root.
Flags functions with the same name in more than one loaded package, such as filter().
Reads and writes SPSS, Stata, and SAS files, keeping value labels.
Reads and writes Parquet files and works with data larger than memory.
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
Online
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.
Lincoln and Nebraska
Wednesday-morning gathering where local founders present their businesses and take questions from the community.
Lincoln meetup for people who write code.
Lincoln meetup about artificial intelligence.
Nebraska Women in Tech Summit AKSARBEN Foundation
Annual summit and awards celebrating women in technology across Nebraska. I volunteer there.
Websites and resources
RDM Weekly Crystal Lewis
Weekly newsletter of research data management 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.
See also: Collaborative Lesson Development Training, The Carpentries Incubator, The Carpentries Lab
Collaborative Lesson Development Training
The Carpentries’ own course on building a lesson as an open source project: lesson design, collaborating on one, and the lesson infrastructure. Teams of two to five work on a single real lesson across six half-days, and at least one person per team needs Instructor Training or Learner-Centered Teaching first.
See also: The Carpentries Incubator, The Carpentries Lab
Where community members develop lessons in the open, before any review. Plenty is taught from here already; treat it as work in progress rather than as vetted material.
The peer-reviewed tier: short-format lessons that have been through review and follow the Carpentries lesson design. Review here can also produce a paper in the Journal of Open Source Education, which mints a DOI, so a lesson becomes a citable peer-reviewed publication rather than only a teaching resource. Submission is by invitation while the review process is piloted.