This week was the first time I had ever attempted coding in an educational context,and compared to my last attempt at coding,thankfully, it was mostly painless.

Week 1 Coding Goals

Given that this was a new attempt at coding, I figured I would just take things slow and set some small, basic goals to start off.

  1. Go through the coding tutorial while putting the new information into practice.
  2. Learn how to set up an RPubs account
  3. Figure out how to set RStudio to dark mode so I look more like the hackers and coders you see in movies.

With those goals in mind, I set off on my coding odyssey.

Challenges and Successes

1. Working through the coding tutorial

The Week 1 coding tutorial was well explained, easy to follow, and pretty quick.

I worked through each example alongside Professor Navarro, which made each step easy to understand, and quick. This was particularly helpful because the videos were structured in such a way that you could immediately see the results of your code.

I also liked that it was online so I could take the video at my own pace and rewind any parts that I didn’t initially understand.

I would describe this as a smashing success, with the only minuscule challenge being a minor misunderstanding of blockquotes, and some issues with photos.

I didn’t realise I needed an empty space before and after the text I wanted to blockquote so it didn’t work at first. But that was quickly solved with some trial and error.

And with the photos, I tried uploading one from my computer but I only had huge files, so when it didn’t immediately show up in the preview I was a bit worried. It eventually showed up, no thanks to my slow internet haha.

2. Setting up an RPubs account

Initially, I was a little worried since I had seen people post links to their RPubs as early as Wednesday and was quite confused as to where they learnt to do that. But of course, as I reached the end of the Week 1 Coding videos, it became quite obvious.

And in a minute, I created my account, shared the link on the spreadsheet, and was on my merry way.

3. Turning RStudio to Dark Mode so I look like a hacker

This is a pretty trivial goal but I thought it would be fun since hackers in movies are always working on screens with black backgrounds and coloured texts. A few of my friends who do computer science also do this and they say it helps them feel cooler when they code so I thought, why not?

But this proved much more difficult than I thought.

For most of the week, I have been using the webversion of RStudio, which doesn’t seem to have an option for dark mode. So, I tried to download the desktop version of RStudio. But it just would not open. Everytime I tried to open it, it said it couldn’t find a particular file in the library.

I searched for solutions online, I tried deleting and re-downloading the app, I even downloaded a different R app (which I don’t think is the right one). I was about to give up and call it a failure.

But, as I was writing this log, I tried to open it again to take a screenshot of the error message. And this time, for some reason, it worked! (huzzah!)

Here is what it looks like (I chose the Cobalt theme):

I haven’t figured out how to link my RStudio account to the desktop app yet, but that’s a task for next week.

Next steps in my coding journey

Since I thought this week was fairly easy to understand, I’m quite excited to take on more challenging functions.

  • I’m quite excited to actually learn to code in R so I can put the ‘R’ in ‘R-Markdown’ since most of what we have done is not much more difficult than using Microsoft Word.
  • Figure out how to use RStudio on desktop to make use of the new-found dark mode
  • Continue on with the videos and try get ahead by completing both the Week 2 and week 3 tutorials
    • I’m trying to get ahead since I have some big assignments in Week 4