Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Birthing the pregnancy package
💬 Speaker(s): Ella Kaye
Abstract:
When I was pregnant, I wrote a personal, private package for date and medication calculations, hard-coded with my data. I thought it would be easy to adapt for general use, but no! I wanted the user experience to be excellent, but how to avoid them repeatedly entering the same due date and meds? How to print useful, nicely formatted, grammatically correct information to the console? How to test a package that relies on the current date? Using the pregnancy package as a case study, I'll show how to take advantage of base R features such as global options and %||%, how the cli and rlang packages came to the rescue for messages and how testthat's new mocking features saved the day (literally!) to create a package that's a pleasure to use.
📁 Slides: github.com/EllaKaye/pregnancy-lightning-talk posit::conf(2025) Subscribe to posit::conf updates: posit.co/about/subscription-management
Birthing the pregnancy package
💬 Speaker(s): Ella Kaye
Abstract:
When I was pregnant, I wrote a personal, private package for date and medication calculations, hard-coded with my data. I thought it would be easy to adapt for general use, but no! I wanted the user experience to be excellent, but how to avoid them repeatedly entering the same due date and meds? How to print useful, nicely formatted, grammatically correct information to the console? How to test a package that relies on the current date? Using the pregnancy package as a case study, I'll show how to take advantage of base R features such as global options and %||%, how the cli and rlang packages came to the rescue for messages and how testthat's new mocking features saved the day (literally!) to create a package that's a pleasure to use.
📁 Slides: github.com/EllaKaye/pregnancy-lightning-talk posit::conf(2025) Subscribe to posit::conf updates: posit.co/about/subscription-management
