Creating user-friendly documentation to support software development
talk
MAMS
documentation
webR
How we documented the MAMS package with pkgdown, and how webR lets readers run package code in the browser.
A short talk about what a statistical programmer does in a methods group, using my work on the MAMS package as the example. It covers:
- what goes into a pkgdown site and how one is built from a package’s help files and vignettes;
- the MAMS documentation site we built this way;
- interactive output in slides, shown with a Plotly animation of the central limit theorem;
- webR, which runs R inside the browser, so readers can edit and run MAMS examples without installing anything.
On webR, the gains are near-native speed in the browser and nothing to install, neither R on the reader’s computer nor a server. The limits at the time were that not every CRAN package was available, code runs on a single core, and access to local files is restricted.
The slides are a Quarto revealjs presentation styled after the BSU template, with a live webR console. They are embedded below; press F for full screen, or open them in a new tab. R takes a few seconds to load before the code cells run.