R code cafe notes

codecafe.md

no-one is using the etherpad.

by 1745 (15 minutes in) some people had made a plot, most people downloading and installing.

by 1800 (30 minutes in), many people have a plot.

installing on arch and gentoo is hard (arch user gave up installing Rstudio and used command line; gentoo user had to use VNC!). Installing on Ubuntu was hard too.

Someone asked "what does pch=1 do?" (in the call to legend)

On Windows, setting the language to Greek means the Rstudio installer has all the wrong characters. much emojibake. seems to work though!

Wifi. one person found it unreliable. Didn't seem particularly fast for anyone.

If using a version of R < 3.2 then the mirrors don't generally carry packages for older versions. So you're SOL.

When specifically asking people for verbal feedback the general responses were that it was helpful, friendly, nice format. Many people wanted more (quite a few without prompting asked if it was running next week at the same time). When specifically asked what did people want more of the responses were: more R (twice); pandas; iceberg; SPSS; bring-our-own-data.

We should've made a guest list and ticked people off (if only to get accurate numbers)

I had similar questions about formatting, essentially it came down to personal preference and as Will said, legacy

Many people asking if the session would be run again. Since there will be people coming from a large array of backgrounds, it might be worth eventually thinking about more focused, research area-specific/language-specific sessions - one guy offered to help if a similar session was run on C++

Some housekeeping problems - power source was an issue, but Mike mentioned that could be rectified. Also, I thought we could steal an idea from software carpentry to employ the 'pink sticky' system - hand out bright post-its that people can stick to their laptops and flag us down. Might work well considering I was relying on spotting puzzled facial expressions. Also, table spacing wasn't great to navigate, but not impossible.

Considering some people didn't notice they had to download R studio as well as R, I'm not surprised they didn't use the etherpad. They probably didn't even notice! Software carpentry tried to get us to use it but we didn't take to it. I think it can be intimidating interacting on a "public" platform. Might need to give a brief intro on how it works

Q: What are integers shown when do str(dataset$someFactor? A: when a categorical variable is encoded as a factor then each of the valid values that the factor can take is mapped to an integer and only this integer is stored per observation (partly for efficiency reasons).

We should revisit factors in a later session and aim to cover things like setting factor levels, factor ordering and converting factors to numeric or character vectors.

I liked the fact that the materials were on github (using it as a publishing platform, essentially), and no ones seemed to notice or care.