A Look Back at 2024

Photo by Manuel Cosentino on Unsplash

Another year, another opportunity to reflect. A summary of my year, month by month. Grateful to still be here and for the people I shared the year with.

January was for the summer holidays.

This was the first time we spent summer on the beach. My kids taught me how to play with the waves, and we enjoyed a lot of seafood, churros, and tortas fritas with mate.

I finished reading “The Boy on the Bridge” by M.R. Carey.

February was for community work.

Marked the kick-off of the rOpenSci champions program’s second cohort and the first cohort’s evaluation. We taught the first track of the training, which focused on coding.

It was also for The Carpentries Board of Director Retreat and to join the monthly meetings of the R Consortium Infrastructure Steering Committee and the R User Groups Program.

We worked hard to create and implement the process and infrastructure to discuss openly with the R-Ladies community.

March was for news.

Some good news: I received the GitHub Star award again for the third year in a row.

Some worrying news: My diagnosis of thyroid cancer was confirmed. I later discovered it is the least dangerous and simplest of all the cancers you can get. So, as an acquaintance would say, you are lucky even when things go wrong for you.

April was for reading.

I read several fiction stories written by a very dear friend.

I read the results of all the medical and pre-surgery examinations.

I started reading “The Reading Mind” by Daniel T. Willingham in the clinic waiting rooms.

I read all the papers I had to sign for the surgery.

I read “Potentes, prepotentes e impotentes” by Quino.

I read all the messages of love from my friends and family.

I read all the comments from R-Ladies community members, who left us their opinions about changing the organization’s name.

May was for writing.

My surgery was a success. As I shared before, the biggest pain was that I could not talk and laugh as much as I wanted to because it hurt so much.

But I could write, so I enrolled in an online writing course to write 30 posts in 30 days. And I did it. I wanted to use that course as an excuse to move on to the second edition of Teaching Tech Together. Will I ever be able to finish it?

I’m lucky (as my acquaintance said) because my family, friends, and colleagues were there for me whenever I needed them. I find it incredible to be able to be so close to people who are thousands of miles away.

I read Terry Pratchett’s “The Color of Magic” in Spanish. I also read and enjoyed the photo book “As If the sand were stone."

June was for sharing

I was invited to the CZI Open Science meeting. During the panel “Case Study Session 3: Demonstrating Impact of Open Science”, I shared the work of rOpenSci and some of our members in my talk “Reproducible Open Science by and for All”. During the projects' show-and-tell session, I also provided details about the rOpenSci Champions Program.

I celebrated two years as the community manager of rOpenSci. I started writing a series of blog posts where I reflect on my work, share the projects I am involved in, and describe my role.

July was for recovering.

July marks the winter break from my children’s school. We had plans to go to the snow, but instead, my doctors recommended radioactive iodine treatment. This meant I had to be isolated for about 10 days while I took the iodine and had my check-ups, so we couldn’t travel to the mountains.

While in isolation, I celebrated another championship of the Argentine national soccer team, finished reading “The Art of Choosing” by Sheena Iyengar and “Rosewater” by Tade Thompson, and had Zoom meetings with friends and for work, which helped me cope.

August was for teaching.

Although I spent the first half of the year developing weekly lessons to teach my 14-year-old nephew how to code, the return of winter break marked the start of a new course for the data science degree at Austral University.

We developed the Programming II course with Paola Corrales. In it, students learn R for data analysis and visualization and end up with an R package that combines everything they learned during the course. I also taught for several diploma courses in agroanalysis and for the rOpenSci Champions Program.

I finished “Insurrection” by Tade Thompson.

September was for spring cleaning.

Because September is the month of spring where I live! (Although I started or finished some of these tasks in other months).

I worked on updating a lot of rOpenSci documentation, such as our Blog Guide for Authors and Editors, Community Contributing Guide, Localization and Translation Guidelines (which we finished publishing in December), and rOpenSci Champions Program Internal Playbook (which is still a work in progress).

I also closed many issues, reviewed and merged many pull requests (and created new ones), and updated issue templates, GitHub projects, and internal documentation related to community management tasks.

I finished “Redemption” by Tade Thompson.

October was for collaborations.

I had conversations with people from other communities and organizations, which resulted in an invitation to serve on the jury for the “Telling with Data” contest, another invitation to review talks for Nerdearla and Nerdearla Mexico, and another invitation to serve on the Climate Sensitive Infectious Disease Network Collaborative Committee. We also did some work with Epiverse and data.org in our new partnership with them and RECON.

We announce that CZI has awarded funds to rOpenSci for Sustainable Research Software Development in Latin America through our Champions Program.

I enjoyed supporting and learning about our Champions Outreach activities with several organizations around the world and in several human languages.

We celebrate my youngest son’s birthday.

November was for conferences.

The month started with the first community call in Portuguese for rOpenSci.

The following week, I had the wonderful opportunity to give the closing keynote for BioNT + CarpentryConnect in Heidelberg, Germany. I participated in the conference, meeting many people in person (and spend some day with them, thank you Raniere!), meeting new people with whom to collaborate, and learning more about several projects of The Carpentries. The icing on the cake was participating in the Epiverse mini hackathon, where we tested the translation process of these lessons with the process generated by rOpenSci.

The following week was LatinR. How much I love this conference! We had two days of workshops and satellite events. I had the chance to give a tutorial on GitHub for scientists with another Github Star, Beatriz Milz. We also organized the rOpenSci Traslaton to translate our content into Portuguese. Then, we had three conference days, with two great keynotes and many excellent talks about everything the Latin American community is doing with R. The presentations of the people who are part of rOpenSci were the moments I enjoyed the most, especially Will Landau’s keynote about targets, Maelle Salmon’s talk about babeldown and babel quarto, Elio’s talk about multilingual support, and Andrea Vargas' talk about Arcenso, her project as a champion of our program. There were a lot of other rOpenSci and R-Ladies members participating in LatinR.

I ended the month teaching from spreadsheet to R for the Software Camp organized by the Software Sustainability Institute.

And I celebrate my birthday!

December was for family.

December is the birthday of many family members, but the most especial one are my eldest son and my sister’s birdhday.

I had many gatherings with friends to say goodbye to the year.

Then come the holidays, when we travel or receive our family. We share conversation, games, swimming, gifts, meals, and good wishes. It is also the month to reflect on what happened and to be grateful.

I finished “Wolfhound Century” by Peter Higgins and “The Circle” by Dave Eggers.

Wrapping up

Let’s close with some numbers (just because I love data and numbers):

I wrote 80 blog posts, 68 for my website and 12 for rOpenSci. I haven’t completed the #100daytoOffload challenge. Yet.

I swim 111 km. But I could not participate in any competition.

I delivered 10 talks and 1 keynote and appeared on the Code for Thought and Sustain podcast. I read 10 books and wrote 2. I open the material for 5 courses (ranging from 2 hours to a semester-long, in English and Spanish).

Regarding my GitHub activity, I made 1853 commits. My longest streak was 24 days. March was my most productive month, and Monday was my most productive day. My social media activity is split between Mastodon, LinkedIn, and now BlueSky. I don’t have numbers for all of them, but Mastodon is still the one I use the most.

What a year! I’m still here, and that is a lot :-)

Thank you for reading. I wish you a good new year. See you all in 2025.