Where my first R package was more a proof-of-concept, I now certainly left the beginneRs group by publishing an R package to a private Github repository at work. I used that package in some R scripts performing various real-time analysis of our operations already. This by loading it through the devtools package, and specifically the install_github() function.

Next, I will have to check the install_url() function, as I had not quite figured out at the time of writing my initial R package how I could actually use it in a script without manually installing it first.

The ability to script regular reporting and publish results as graphs and tables and publishing these in emails (opening a gateway into for instance Slack) or in Excel files, is very empowering. To an extent, I used to do this using VBA some years ago. Doing that in an integrated way with various datasources required a lot more work though, certainly given how the MS Windows environment until not so long ago lacked decent support for scripted operations for anyone but in-the-know IT professionals.