Post Provided By DR IAIN STOTT

Iain is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and the MaxO Center at the University of Southern Denmark. He is currently working as a part of MaxNetAging, a Research Network on Aging. Iain was one of the presenters at the UK half of the Methods in Ecology and Evolution 5th Anniversary Symposium in April. You can watch his talk, ‘Methods Put to Good Use: Advances in population ecology through studies of transient demography’ here.

If you’re anything like me, you might experience a minor existential crisis weekly. As scientists we question the world around us and, for me, this questioning turns all-too-often inwards to my career. I don’t think that’s unusual: ask any scientist about their ‘Plan B’, and the extent to which it’s thought through is often astonishing (if a café-cum-cocktail bar ever opens in Glasgow’s West End, which specialises in drinks that employ spice blends from around the world and are named after old spice trade routes and trading vessels, then you know I’ve jumped the science ship).

Contributing open-source software is something which has made my work feel a bit more relevant and helped me feel a bit less of an imposter. I’ll explain why that is, give some tips to beginners for building a first R package, and hopefully persuade other (especially early-career) researchers to do the same. Continue reading →