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INBO coding club: share digital skills in a welcoming environment

View the Project on GitHub inbo/coding-club

Getting started

Introduction

Welcome! We’re glad you are interested in our exploration of R, coding and data analysis. The coding club is an environment where we experiment together, share code and learn from each other. Everyone has an equal say and can express themselves freely. We are convinced that everyone can learn from each other, irrespective of the experience. As a particant, we ask you to check and respect our code of conduct.

This page provides the information for first-time participants as well as some information to get you started for each new session. If anyhting is missing in these instructions, please raise a New issue on GitHub or adapt the notes directly.

Technical setup

In advance

First time setup

:scale 85% When done, the coding club folder on your computer should look like:

├── coding-club.Rproj
├── data
└── src

Note for git-users: When familiar with Git, you can setup a coding club using the git-integration of Rstudio. Go to File and choose New Project.... Pick Version control, next Git and fill in the URL of the coding club in the Repository URL: https://github.com/inbo/coding-club

Each session setup

To complete the challenges, both data sets and R code are used in the sessions:

How to download a single file?

The links to the data sets and source code will be provided, e.g. this script. For all type files except csv, tsv (i.e. text files with extensions different than txt):

  1. go to the page and look for the button Raw or Download
  2. right click on this button and choose Save link as (or Link opslaan als)
  3. navigate to the respective folder (either src or data) and save the file

For csv or tsv (all text files with extension not txt):

  1. go to the page and look for the button Raw or Download.
  2. right click on this button and choose Open as new tab (or Link openen in nieuw tabblad)
  3. select in the new tab the option Save page as (or Pagina opslaan als )
  4. navigate to the respective folder (either src or data) and save the file

How to donwload data automatically?

We wrote an R function to help you downloading all material you need. In your coding-club project: just run inborutils::setup_codingclub_session(). For downloading a past coding club edition pass the date in the "yyyymmdd" format to the function.

Note for git-users: You can do git pull origin master (or click the pull button in the git tab) to download the new material.

The challenges

Each coding club session focuses on a specific theme with a number of challenges to solve. Altough we aim to solve these challenges by the end of the session, learning from each other is the main purpose. To achieve this, we use our home-brew sticky note concept:

:scale 100%

Tips and tricks

The power of TAB button: When writing code in Rstudio, you can use the TAB keyboard-button to autocomplete variables and function names!

No more setwd: By using the Rstudio projects, you no longer need to use setwd(), or full file paths inside read_csv()-like functions. Instead, you can use a relative file path, e.g. read_csv("data/mydatafile.csv) instead of read_csv("C://users/AnakinSkywalker/Documents/coding-club/data/mydatafile.csv). As such, it becomes much easier to share your code with others (having another folder structure on their computer). In case you need to refer to a parent folder using relative links, use two dots ../folder-name to go up one folder level. Don’t forget the power of the TAB button as well, as Rstudio will autocomplete file/folder names as well.