Econometrics and Free Software

This is a post based on two other posts I wrote for LinkedIn.

Last summer, while relaxing on the beaches of Berck, a French town known for treating tuberculosis in kids by exposing them to the fresh maritime air (back in 19th century, they have antibiotics these days), I found myself daydreaming about building my own

I was recently reading Davis Vaughan’s blog post Semi-automating 200 Pull Requests with Claude Code and it really resonated with me, as I’ve been using LLMs for tedious tasks like that for some time now.

An optimised layout for a polyglot country 5 years ago I discussed what features a keyboard optimised for Luxembourg should have.

This is a toy post demonstrating per-post Nix dependencies.

Last time I quickly introduced my latest package, {rixpress}, but I think that to really understand what {rixpress} brings to the table, one needs to solve the same problem without it.

TL;DR: {rixpress} lets you build multi-language data pipelines (R, Python, Julia) where each step runs in its own reproducible environment.

How is it that in the year 2025 of our Lord installing a Python package is still such a gamble?

The more I use LLMs for programming, the more it seems to me that they can only be used successfully if you ask them to do things that you could do yourself.

It looks like a major update to {ggplot2} is coming (version 4.0.0), where Posit is switching the internals from S3 to S7.

If you want to watch a 2-Minute video introduction to {rixpress}, click the image below: In August last year I tried to see how one could use Nix as a built automation tool for data science pipelines, and in March this year, I’ve started working on an R p…

As I’ve already discussed in this vignette of my {rix} package, it is very easy to run a {targets} pipeline inside of a Nix environment for increased reproduciblity.

Here’s why nixpkgs is a GitHub repository that contains tens of thousands of Nix expressions used by the Nix package manager to install software.

No image this time Imagine you have a function that does something complicated, and in the middle of its definition it generates a variable.

Happy new year!

Simplifies the creation of reproducible data science environments using the ‘Nix’ package manager, as described in Dolstra (2006) <ISBN 90-393-4130-3>.

Nix is not only a package manager, but also a build automation tool, and you can use it to build polyglot data science pipelines in a completely reproducible way.

Intro I have this package on CRAN called {chronicler} and last month I got an email from CRAN telling me that building the package was failing, and I had two weeks to fix it.

I’ve very recently started contributing to the nixpkgs repository of packages, which contains all the packages you can install from the Nix package manager.

After 5 months of work, Philipp Baumann and myself are happy to announce that our package, {rix} is getting quite close to being in a state we consider “done” (well, at least, for a first release).