• R Coding Café
  • Practical info
  • Notes

On this page

  • Things to do before asking for help
  • Asking a clear coding question
  • Note about sensitive data

Things to do before asking for help

Being a good coder in R does not necessarily mean that one just sits down and writes a lot of code like writing a piece of text. Even experienced R users search online for code. The great thing about R is that there is often multiple solutions to a coding problem. What often separates an experienced user from a new user is that the experienced user know what to search for, where to search and understand the replies. We suggest that you try to search on either Google or directly in Stackoverflow.

AI-tools

As a next step, it can be useful to use AI-tools like ChatGPT; however, beware that it can make up functions, and that it does not always work.

Asking a clear coding question

Some issues are simple such as I cannot download this package. Other times what you want to do is more complex and needs a bit of background for a person outside your project to understand what you want to do. Therefore, you need to prepare and provide the context to the person you are asking for help. This could be in the form of showing the structure of your dataset, which functions you used, and what you have tried so far.

Minimal, reproducible examples

The first lesson in the coding café is specifically about preparing a good question (read about Minimal, Reproducible Examples).

Note about sensitive data

If you are working on DST

you are not allowed to show the data to anyone else!

You may need to prepare your question a bit more. We recommend that you find an example dataset that looks similar to the dataset you work with and write down a coding example.

 
  • License: CC BY 4.0

  • Contributing guidelines

  • Code of Conduct