use R, YAML and bookdown to automate generation of procedure books

Context: How to do this thing that only your colleague does when he’s not here?

I recently put on github a project that contains a little framework to list procedures in a structured way that can be shared with all your colleagues or buddies.

You may know situations where someone in your team has build a project that he is the only one to mastering. How to make it works when he is not here ? Maybe he has written a doc / procedure that explains his project but you don’t know (or don’t remember) where it is on the network (or on the web)?

As a solution, an index of all procedures can be useful, one that lists:

  • summary of all procedures (as simple steps)
  • links to git repositories
  • links to more detailed procedures (docx, pdf, html)
  • links to data sources used by projects
  • etc.

reciproceed sounds like “reciprocally” meaning that once all procedures are listed this way, all the team will be involved reciprocally.

Idea

To do this, an idea is: using a YAML file and bookdown to build a shareable procedure listing like a book.

Example

As an example, I collected some soup recipes and fake procedures, see the source YAML file.

Soup recipes are used as fake data (meaning that they are structured and have chronological steps like procedures) but they are not fake soups. By the way they came from bbcfoods.

And the result book is here:

Soup recipe example

Maybe

Maybe someone else will be interested by this and even will participate to improve it.

It’s here, https://github.com/GuillaumePressiat/reciproceed