teaching

A while ago, I decided to learn some Rust. I bought a book, opened it months later and started a small side-project: porting my R package saperlipopette to the terminal by writing a CLI with Rust. I then lost steam and discarded the project. Now, teaching more Git with saperlipopette has me itching to do the same outside of R, to reach more learners. And in the meantime, even though I have conflicting feelings about it, I realized that using an LLM, specifically Claude Code (Opus 4.

In which I share a crochet analogy for Git commits… This post was featured on the R Weekly highlights podcast hosted by Eric Nantz and Mike Thomas. Don’t forget your stitch markers! I am happily continuing my crochet learning journey. One lesson I have now internalised is that I should never ever forget or neglect to use stitch markers. Stitch markers are sort of small, not spiky, safety pins. A crochet project featuring several stitch markers (beginning of a Snorlax from Lee Sartori’s Pokemon crochet book)

Thanks to Athanasia Mo Mowinckel for reviewing this post! One goal of mine this year is to learn how to crochet amigurumi, that is to say, cute creatures. When working on my first project, a cat toy made out of yarn left-over from knitting projects, I thought of some similarities between this activity and being a beginner in programming. Here they are! This poor bee has heart wings… mounted the wrong way so won’t be able to flee the cat it was gifted to.

I got more confident with Git since reading Git in practice. This has resulted in a more enjoyable Git practice! I’m also more keen to sharing Git “tips” with others, but felt it was challenging to quickly come up with examples to demo some Git workflows. This is what motivated my creating saperlipopette, an R package containing small Git playgrounds to practice various Git commands and strategies! What is saperlipopette? The saperlipopette package creates Git messes, or playgrounds, that users need to solve.

I somewhat regularly teach about package development. One recent example was a workshop for rOpenSci champions. I am improving my teaching over time (thankfully 😅) but one thing I have down by now is the intro, which is mostly my throwing together my favorite quotes about R package development! Let me write it up. Where I explain why people shouldn’t flee the workshop After boasting a bit (a.k.a. sharing my package development creds to introduce myself), I answer three retorical questions:

Last week I had the pleasure to lead an online course about “Scientific Blogging with R Markdown”, invited by Najko Jahn and Anne Hobert from SUB Göttingen. To follow the example set by the incredible Alison Hill, I’ll write a summary of what I’ve learnt and would like to do better next time. The topic The topic of the course was “Scientific Blogging with R Markdown”. For months I would sometimes write down some ideas, from “present distill” to “show web developer console”, that I had whilst reading things online.