I've been trying to figure out a good way to teach a "getting unstuck" lesson that would include:
- Navigating and searching help files - Googling problems and error messages, and good web resources - Debugging code - Help fora and writing minimum reproducible examples (MREs) One of the biggest challenges thinking about this has been finding problems that could be presented as examples or exercises. So I went through the archives of our local R support listserv and pulled out some actual posts and put them a repo: https://github.com/noamross/zero-dependency-problems-r/tree/master These are all in R and are "zero dependency", in that they are about base R problems rather than package-specific ones [^1]. In general they are short and require not much more knowledge (though perhaps more expertise) than taught in an SWC workshop. Only some are MREs, but I like this because they help think about how to make MREs. I hope people can contribute more examples, including python/shell/(git?). I think "wild caught" questions are a good starting point, though it may make sense to modify them for teaching purposes. It would probably make sense to categorize these once there are enough. Thoughts? Please respond in the repo issues. Noam [^1]: Although I note the vast majority of questions I slogged through ARE about package-specific issues, which makes me think that it's important to teach about packages and package ecosystems.
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