This morning I announced the first bookdown contest. I wished to launch this contest last year but hadn’t had a chance. Basically I was hoping to encourage bookdown users to share their templates and examples, so that other people can reuse them. One motivation was writing academic dissertations. I really wish graduate students won’t need to waste too much time on formatting their dissertations like I (and presumably many other former students) did. To quote JuliaStewart Lowndes:
[…] I wish I could go back in time and write my dissertation in bookdown…
Details about this contest can be found in this blog post. I’ll be looking forward to your submissions in RStudio Community in the next two months.
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I’ll give back a significant portion of the donations to the open-source community and charities. For the record, I received about $30,000 in total (before tax) in 2024-25, and gave back about $15,000 (after tax).