What is ?

• Programming Q/A site launched September 15, 2008 created by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky
• Built as an open alternative to Q/A tech sites such as Experts Exchange
• Rigorous, engaged community with appointed and voted moderators
• Fosters a gaming style with points and milestone badges

• Due to popularity became the flagship site in SE network

• Users
  • Askers: Usually one-off, newcomers who ask few questions
  • Answerers: Usually long-term, advanced members
  • Moderators: Appointed and voted members to manage site
• Posts
  • Immediate help to original posters (OPs)
  • Future help to greater community
• Tags
  • Usually languages (C#, Java, Python, R)
  • Frameworks, tools, and modules (i.e., pandas, dplyr)

• ~11 year old tag with over 300,000 questions to date
  • Creator: David Locke, CRUG Member
• Top 20 tags among software/web development stacks
• Top R Users
  • User: Dirk E., CRUG Member

• Research and debug enough (use SO as last resort)
• Make a genuine effort in trial and question
• Set up a Minimum, Reproducible Example (MRE)
  • Great resource: How to make a great R reproducible example
  • Use dput or data.frame constructor

• Set up time to search for good attempts with reproducible examples
• Work through your comfortable skillsets:
  • [r] [dataframe], [r] [plot], [r] [shiny]
• Provide detailed explanation and in-line code comments
• Demonstrate code with data output and/or graph

### READ TABLE FORMATTED DATA
txt <- '   group int         num char  bool       date
1  stata  14 -0.01933983  FcC FALSE "1992-06-13"
2 python  15 -0.97016057  5V9  TRUE "1993-03-11"
3 python   8  0.01481491  llY FALSE "2017-01-28"
4    sas   5 -1.23408058  IXI FALSE "1985-09-03"
5      r  10  0.54730127  IIQ  TRUE "2015-12-16"
6      r   3 -1.16625133  05x  TRUE "1990-07-18"'

df <- read.table(text=txt, header=TRUE)
df

##    group int         num char  bool       date
## 1  stata  14 -0.01933983  FcC FALSE 1992-06-13
## 2 python  15 -0.97016057  5V9  TRUE 1993-03-11
## 3 python   8  0.01481491  llY FALSE 2017-01-28
## 4    sas   5 -1.23408058  IXI FALSE 1985-09-03
## 5      r  10  0.54730127  IIQ  TRUE 2015-12-16
## 6      r   3 -1.16625133  05x  TRUE 1990-07-18

set.seed(8202019)
alpha <- c(LETTERS, letters, c(0:9))
data_tools <- c("sas", "stata", "spss", "python", "r", "julia")

random_df <- data.frame(
  group = factor(sample(data_tools, 500, replace=TRUE)),
  int = sample(1:15, 500, replace=TRUE),
  num = rnorm(500),
  char = replicate(500, paste(sample(alpha, 3, replace=TRUE), collapse="")),
  bool = sample(c(TRUE, FALSE), 500, replace=TRUE),
  date = as.Date(sample(1:as.integer(Sys.Date()), 500, replace=TRUE), origin="1970-01-01"),
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE
)
head(random_df)

##    group int        num char  bool       date
## 1  stata  14 -0.5096000  Bl8 FALSE 2019-05-11
## 2      r  11  0.4103947  EIf FALSE 1985-03-06
## 3 python  12 -1.9084805  6t9  TRUE 2015-01-19
## 4  julia   1 -0.5869093  hnu FALSE 2000-07-14
## 5   spss   5  0.3613189  XBY FALSE 1976-12-19
## 6      r   9  0.8342512  iay  TRUE 2014-06-08

### ASSIGN OBJECT TO RESULT OF dput(head(random_df))

reproduced_df <- structure(list(group = structure(c(6L, 2L, 2L, 4L, 3L, 3L), .Label = c("julia", 
"python", "r", "sas", "spss", "stata"), class = "factor"), int = c(14L, 
15L, 8L, 5L, 10L, 3L), num = c(-0.019339832897539, -0.970160572336964, 
0.0148149050692396, -1.23408057869592, 0.547301270279682, -1.16625132915773
), char = c("FcC", "5V9", "llY", "IXI", "IIQ", "05x"), bool = c(FALSE, 
TRUE, FALSE, FALSE, TRUE, TRUE), date = structure(c(8199, 8470, 
17194, 5724, 16785, 7503), class = "Date")), row.names = c(NA, 
6L), class = "data.frame")

reproduced_df

##    group int         num char  bool       date
## 1  stata  14 -0.01933983  FcC FALSE 1992-06-13
## 2 python  15 -0.97016057  5V9  TRUE 1993-03-11
## 3 python   8  0.01481491  llY FALSE 2017-01-28
## 4    sas   5 -1.23408058  IXI FALSE 1985-09-03
## 5      r  10  0.54730127  IIQ  TRUE 2015-12-16
## 6      r   3 -1.16625133  05x  TRUE 1990-07-18

• Askers
  • Not too invested with curated repository
  • Often do not care about craft or learning process
  • Passive group who comes and goes
• Answerers
  • Some over-help for rep points without best practices
  • Some over-suggest packages/aglorithms (e.g., tidyverse)
  • Some pose as bullies and intimidate newcomers
    • Updated Code of Conduct: https://stackoverflow.com/conduct

• Break up into ~5 person(s) group
• Launch R notebooks (RStudio or Jupyter) on a computer
• Answer guided questions along Posts, Users, and Tags or find other insights
• Alternate someone to type table/plot solutions
• Submit notebook (PR or email) for presentation