Feedback on Day 2, Unit 1

[apreshill]

Hi @jennybc and @jimhester,

This feedback relates to the following set of materials:

• Slides
• Activities:
  • .Renviron: https://whattheyforgot.org/r-startup.html#renviron
  • .Rprofile: https://whattheyforgot.org/r-startup.html#rprofile

Again, I think use_course was a more pleasant way to do these activities, more for consistency than anything else! Also to see the solutions you had to know to go to https://github.com/jennybc/whattheyforgot/tree/master/activities, and a lot of folks liked seeing those as they worked.

With regard to content, a few meta-comments:

1. Related to the last unit on day 1, you could reiterate that all of these are just plain text files with special names / locations / etc.

2. I don't think the usethis package was explicitly introduced in the slides, but it was needed for the exercises- maybe a few slides showing them the pkgdown site?

Activity 1: .Renviron

1. Motivate why setting up a GitHub PAT is useful (many folks were asking why do I need to do this if I was able to do everything yesterday?)

2. You may have mentioned this verbally but I have noted in my script for 12-startup-01.R:

   usethis::edit_r_environ() # makes the file if not yet made- needs blank line at end!
   

3. I think the stretch exercise of uploading to a gist is hard! Many didn't know what a gist was, and then figuring out how to use the gh package (or any new package at that point) for that one function was tricky. I looked up the solution on that one! Could there be a less strenuous stretch exercise? Or perhaps provide a template script for people to fill in?

Activity 2: .Rprofile

1. Ah I finally got my toad to say "hi there!" My issue was needing a blank line at the end, so probably worth re-iterating that point here too! In my script for 12-startup-02.R I now have:

usethis::edit_r_profile() # makes the file if not yet made- needs blank line at end!

[apreshill]

I just read this blog post re: the trailing new line by Yihui with a neat trick to set this in the RStudio options, may be worth mentioning!