Tricks to increase development speed

[jamesmbaazam]

Some usual development and rinse-and-repeat tasks like generating documentation, reloading the package to test new functionality by running devtools::load_all(), etc can take time when contributing to EpiNow2.

Could you share some tips on how you speed up your developing workflow? I'm hoping to put these together under a section of the contribution guide to help myself and future contributors. There have been talks of rebasing on the cmdstanr branch for example, to compile the models quickly. What are some other shortcuts/tricks you use?
@sbfnk and @seabbs

[sbfnk]

I don't think I have much to offer I'm afraid - when doing lots of work on the stan code I'd indeed sometimes work on branches based on the cmdstanr branch (which won't always recompile everything) and rebase to main only when done. But for work on R code no recompilation should be necessary. I'm not sure about devtools::load_all() but I'm pretty sure R CMD install only recompiles if/when the timestamp of the stan model files gets updated.

[seabbs]

Yup devtools::load_all() caches as well. Unfortunately though for me it produces spuriously slow stan code so I use R CMD install instead.

[seabbs]

Echoing @sbfnk the answer is sadly no which is a real pain.

In theory it should be possible for devtools::document() to skip compilation (rather than just caching as it currently does) which would help for our edge case but that would need to be implemented upstream of us.

[jamesmbaazam]

I've started using the job package for running smaller things like tests in the background so that I can work on other stuff.

For example, after fixing something in estimate_secondary.R, I would run its test in the background with

job::job({devtools::test_active_file(file = "./R/estimate_secondary.R")})

This will free up the console for me to continue working on other stuff.

[seabbs]

I thought that Rstudio already ran tests and package builds in the background when triggered using the short cuts? This sounds like a good solution though.

[jamesmbaazam]

It's always run in my console. Maybe it's a setting somewhere in the IDE? I'll check.

[seabbs]

hmm weird. I could be wrong though as I haven't used Rstudio in a while.

[seabbs]

Using command + shift + t I get this for epinowcast (my console/terminal are on the right here).

[jamesmbaazam]

You're right about using the shortcut. I didn't know that. Thanks.