Last night, I filled a washing machine with laundry and scheduled it to finish in the morning. And do you know what I had to do next? Nothing. I simply went to bed. In stark contrast to 100 years ago, I didn’t need to fill a bucket with water, I didn’t spend an hour rubbing clothes against a washboard to agitate away the dirt, and I didn’t need to worry about whether the prolonged contact between a cleaning detergent and my hands was damaging to the skin.
Continuous integration is an amazing tool when developing R packages. We push a change to the server, and a process is spawned that checks we haven’t done something silly. It protects us from ourselves! However this process can become slow, as typically the CI process starts with a blank virtual machine (VM). If you are using R, then the current most popular CI pipeline is Travis CI, but there’s also Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Circle CI and a few others.