A Personal Message from an Open Source Contributor

Dear fellow developers and data scientists:

If everyone reading this gave just the price of a coffee, I could focus fully on open source work for our community. But not everyone can or will contribute, and that’s okay.

For years, I’ve built and maintained open source R packages—cpp11armadillo, capybara, gravity, tabulapdf, pointblank, and more—that many people use daily. Every GitHub issue and email gets a response. This is my way of giving back as my own research benefits from a wide range of R packages and tools developed by others.

I’m a PhD student from Chile currently in Canada. My scholarship payments have been delayed for now almost five months because of an administrative error starting with my name spelled wrong.

I wrote about this one month ago and I’m still in the same situation. Every time I contact Service Canada by phone and email, I get the same “we will provide an answer in 48 hours” message, but nothing changes. Rent and food can’t wait. To get by, I’ve been:

1, Selling guitar pedals I design and build (inspired by Queen and Dr. Brian May): https://www.instagram.com/maplebooster/. 2. Doing freelance R and Shiny work. My fiverr page is https://www.fiverr.com/msepulveda3. 3. Trying to answer R questions on my blog. I opened a form to collect questions and I try to answer them in blog posts.

I want my software and datasets to stay open. Before considering paywalls or commercializing, I’m asking the community for support. If my packages have helped you, please consider a small contribution on Buy Me a Coffee.

Despite these challenges, I’m not slowing down, slowing down means getting into bad mood looking at how I have been using the credit cards and try to stay afloat, and among other reasons this moved me to leave my former PhD program to pursue a new path in the UK. Working on cpp4r and armadillo4r keeps me going through code debugging while I hear on the phone “all of our agents are busy, please call later.” I will be releasing a cool R package to use Tabler in Shiny apps soon.

To everyone who’s helped with code, bug reports, or encouragement: thank you. Every bit of support helps keep this work going. The open source world thrives on mutual support—today, I’m asking for yours.

With appreciation and hope,

Pacha

P.S. If you can’t contribute financially, sharing this message with others who might benefit from my work is also a huge help. Open source is about supporting each other.