system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Software Package?

To describe the situation, I am a very recently graduated PhD student who will be entering a faculty position in the fall. My field is biostatistics. I have recently published a paper detailing some (in my humble opinion) cool new methods that is garnering some attention, and several groups have contacted me about implementation of my methods via an R package that I published. Great! I'm excited and humbled that people have found my work useful.

Here's the problem: my R package sucks. Frankly, it sucks ass. I'm not a programmer and I did not approach package development holistically; instead of evolving the package alongside my work as I wrote the paper, I chucked a bunch of disparate functions in the package after I had hardcoded my methods repeatedly (with tweaks) throughout my research. Broadly put, my methods integrate multiple sources of data that have very nuanced and confusing formatting (think genetic and genomic stuff). Trying to provide a full suite of functionality for this application feels daunting, bordering on impossible. There's lots of fine tuned QC that it feels like my package should implement, but doesn't. There's some QC and alignment my package performs, but there isn't a coherent pipeline, and many reasonable things you would want to do are not easy to implement.

What's the solution here? Is there one besides 'do better'? I'm not a software developer, I find it boring as hell and I'm not good at it. Do I dedicate a couple of weeks + (that tbh I don't have) to really upgrading the package and retesting it in all of its use cases? Is the responsibility on other researchers to understand my shitty code? Should I just keep answering questions over and over and try to gently guide researchers along so they don't give up on my method? Curious as to how others handle this.
gpt
I’m not lucky enough to be an owner of a popular package (congrats!), but one thing you could try is to make the package source code accessible to the public and let other people help you out.


I don’t know where is your package hosted (CRAN?) but if you also host it on Github and describe that optimalization is needed in the readme, someone who finds your method useful could help improve your code.