About me

My name is Alban Sagouis and this is my personal professional website.

There is a dynamic CV that aggregates my blog posts described as professional experiences and also blog posts about photography and other topics.

Current job

I currently work at iDiv, the German Biodiversity Synthesis Center in Jonathan Chase’s group: Biodiversity Synthesis.

As a Scientific programmer:

  1. I extract, aggregate, restructure, check and standardise data from the literature.
  2. I assist colleagues with R problems.
  3. I implement and encourage scientific software reproducibility practices, notably containerisation and automatic testing.
  4. I frequently talk about how great is the renv package.
  5. I use all of the above to build and grow research compendia extracting, restructuring, standardising and checking data in a documented and reproducible environment, publishing and archiving code and data.
  6. I write monthly newsletters to my colleagues which you can find here.
  7. I occasionally build a package of functions used for a specific project such as the sRealmTools package or BioTIMEr.
  8. I co-maintain mobsim, a community simulation R package that we use for work, for teaching and published on CRAN.

Other activities

With rOpenSci, I maintain or co-maintain parzer and rgnparser.

Building this website

I initially used Jekyll and the template Minimal Mistake by Michael Rose and developed and built locally in Visual Studio Code. I wrote about this process in a blog post.

This version of the website was built using Quarto which seems easier to me and better integrated in my workflow.