Another lap around the Sun

Picture of Todd Rhines on Unsplash

This year was full of emotions, difficult decisions, and important changes. Reflecting on what happened will help me to improve.

January-March - What a summer

• The year began with me recovering from a hysterectomy and the difficult decision to request an unpaid leave from INTA, my full-time job. After two years of working at home, I realized how much I was missing from my children by having to go to the office. I didn’t want to miss anything else. Since I could not work from home for INTA, I decided to dedicate myself full-time to my community tasks.

April - May

• I intended to dedicate the 40 hours a week from INTA to MetaDocencia, which I did until the end of May when I stepped down from the Core Team.

• We organized a Book Club of Teaching Tech Together, and I started to work on the second edition of the book. I did not achieve as much progress as I wanted, but I have a nice list of issues and new bibliography, the draft of a new chapter and several modifications to three chapters.

May-June - autumn, the best time of the year in La Pampa

• I started to look for alternative jobs, and as always, teaching was where I focused part of my time. I also applied for the position of Community Manager at rOpenSci, where I started working in mid-June.

• The online version of useR! 2022 took place, which did not turn out as well as the previous version in terms of accessibility, although we could maintain the differential prices and the contents in different languages and in different time zones.

July - winter in the Portuguese summer

• I traveled abroad for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. The reason: The Carpentries Executive Council retreat. One of the most beautiful global community governance work experiences I have ever been a part of.

• Due to this trip, I joined the organizing team of the csv,conf to be held in Buenos Aires next year.

• We publish the Ten simple rules to host an inclusive conference based on our experience organizing useR! 2021.

August to October

• I stepped down from my position as Forwards conference team leader but continue to participate in the update of the useR! Knowledge base.

• I focused on my new role at rOpenSci, did work on our Code of Conduct, and launched three new projects:

  • Meet the Stars of the R Universe an interviews series where we present the stories of the people behind the open source software we use.

  • Multilingual Publishing: where we build the infrastructure to internationalize and localize our processes, starting with our software peer review.

  • Champions Program: a mentoring & training program for Scientific Open Source Champions for people from historically and systematically excluded groups interested in contributing to rOpenSci and the broader open source and open science communities.

• I taught again in person for the first time since the pandemic.

• We have an awesome online LatinR.

• After continuing with some health problems and after tests and studies, we concluded that my tumor was benign. I do not need surgery for the moment.

November and December - We are the world’s champions

• I had my birthday and a new bookcase.

• After 18 years of being together with my partner, I again forgot our anniversary, and

• Argentina added its third star as the champion of the 2022 World Cup.

• I sent my resignation to INTA after twenty-four and a half years of being a researcher.

• We announce the R-Ladies Global Leadership Team Transition, after more than one year of hard work.

Final numbers

I delivery 30 talks (7 keynotes) that reach 6500+ attendees. I organize 1 Book Club (30 attendees) and 4 conferences (~3000 attendees). I taught 15 courses that reach 362 people. I also oversee 21 exams and certified 9 persons as RStudio Tidyverse or Shiny instructors.

I wrote 54 blog post, 3 translations (22 talks at NWIT, 1 book, 1 Code of Conduct), 7 conference papers, and 1 journal paper.

I was part of 2 Steering Commitee ( Notebooks Now! and Research Software Camps), 2 Core Teams ( MetaDocencia and Forwards), 1 Executive Council ( The Carpentries) and 1 Board of Directors ( R-Ladies).

According to GitHub Wrapped, I did 2351 commits, 2622 total contributions in 46 repositories. I also opened 180 issues, 94 pull requests, and I did 66 pull reviews. My top languages are HTML, TeX, SCSS, and R. My Top day was Mar 21 with 176 commits, and my more productive day was Saturday.

Final thoughts

Many things happened, some of them painful, but like everything in life, if we pay attention and reflect, we will learn.

The most important thing this year was to remember and embrace that times change, everyone’s expectations, and commitments changes; everything changes. There is a combination of people and energies at some point, and good things come out. And then, you have to start building somewhere else.

With time we have to look at everything that we did, not to focus on small pettiness, but to remember the path, the lessons learned, the affection of so many people, and the fruit of effort, of well-intentioned and well-done work, which in my case, has not been little.