7+ tools to make your Stata life more pleasant Jesse Wursten 1 - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Jan 21, 2023 266 likes •587 views

7+ tools to make your Stata life more pleasant Jesse Wursten 1 London SUGM, August 2019 1 Faculty of Economics and Business KU Leuven 1 User-Computer Interaction Four commands that make the computer talk to you sendtoslack cdo

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7+ tools to make your Stata life more pleasant

Jesse Wursten1 London SUGM, August 2019

1Faculty of Economics and Business

KU Leuven 1

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User-Computer Interaction

Four commands that make the computer talk to you

sendtoslack
cdo
stop
beep

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sendtoslack

Send a message from Stata to your smartphone

Stata tells Powershell what to send and who to send it to
Powershell sends that info to Slack
Slack sends you your message
You receive the message on your desktop or smartphone

Some notes

Easily integrated in other programs (as you will see)
Options can be saved in profjle.do
Available on SSC

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sendtoslack

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cdo

do- things with some extra options
Send message to phone on success
Send message to phone on failure
Execute local copy
Run program on dofjle end
Make log of this run

Some notes

Example of sendtoslack being integrated
cdo can add timestamps to the logfjle names
Available on SSC

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cdo

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cdo

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cdo

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cdo

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stop

stops a dofjle

Can send a message to smartphone
Closes log fjles (if you want to)
That’s more or less it

Some notes

It feels wrong to write errors into my code
Available on SSC

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stop

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beep

Produces a beep

Start your dofjle
Then add the beep command in the command window

Some notes

Requires sound
The beep is moderately annoying
Built-in

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beep

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Lazy Programming

Five commands that help the lazy programmer

batcher
timeit
smallfjleversioning
censusapi
makecode

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batcher

Task parallelisation in Stata

Give batcher a set of arguments (numlist)
Batcher opens a new Stata instance
... runs dofjle with fjrst argument
... opens new Stata, run dofjle with second argument, etc
... reports back when instances fjnish/crash

Some notes

Integrated with sendtoslack
Requires minor adaptation to dofjle
Available on SSC

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batcher

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batcher

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timeit

Single-line timer

Prefjx timeit #:
Use timer list to obtain results

Some notes

You can also give the timers names
Also saves incremental timers
Available on SSC

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timeit

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smallfjleversioning (sfv)

Saves old versions of dofjles automatically

You tell sfv which folders to watch and how often
sfv checks if any of the fjles in there have changed
... if so, it copies those fjles to a different folder
... and names them according to the change date/time

Some notes

Very easy to set up
Less effort than github or manual duplication
Not limited to dofjles
Available on Github: http://bit.ly/sfv_sugm

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sfv

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sfv

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censusapi

Accessing the US Census API

Hides most of the ‘API’-part behind the scenes
Splits the URL into options to make code more readable
Allows for P0100001-P0100022 varlist style
Splits Census calls of too many variables

Some notes

Only tested on Decennial Census and QWI
Available on SSC

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censusapi

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censusapi

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makecode

Create structured code blocks

Can only explain this in picture

Some notes

Meant to be customised
Considering move to Powershell
Not publicly available (email me)

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makecode

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makecode

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makecode

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Bonus tricks

Old tools sometimes work best

Windows copy path
Label data/variable/values

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Any Questions or Suggestions? I highly recommend the Metropolis Theme for Beamer (modifjed version used in this presentation), it can be found at https://github.com/matze/mtheme