Thoughts/ideas to include

[samanthacsik]

From JD Long:

The early hard part is just knowing the vocabulary. True beginners would have no reason to know what a join is. They might describe it as “looking up values from another table” which may not produce helpful results. So reading through a text book or intro class can give vocab

— JD Long (@CMastication) September 14, 2021

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That vocabulary then becomes the enabler for good searching. And I wish I had a better (faster) way to ramp up their vocab.

— JD Long (@CMastication) September 14, 2021

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Maybe we need to just tell learners “read the book for both the concepts AND the vocabulary to ask questions” because I bet they don’t realize this at all.

— JD Long (@CMastication) September 14, 2021

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[samanthacsik]

From Jenny Bryan:

for #rstats, at least, there are ways to do very targeted searches on GitHub that are extremely fruitful

examples: limiting to a specific owner (e.g. cran or tidyverse or whatever), specific folder (e.g. R/)

great way to find examples of stuff working "in the wild"

— Jenny Bryan (@jennybryan) September 14, 2021

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[samanthacsik]

From Wai-Yin Kwan (reached out via Slack after seeing tweet):

I saw your question about teaching people to google for code help. I’m a software developer who has taught other people how to code. I worked at artic data center for a few months late 2020-early 2021.

1. Emphasis googling for code help is a natural part of writing code; too many people new to coding see googling as a sign that they are bad at coding. This problem is especially prevalent in the science researcher community where people have a higher degree of self-doubt in their coding abilities than the software development community.
2. Treat googling for code help as a skill that will get better over time. As you learn more, you will be able to create better search queries.
3. Once they find a search result, it’s ok in the beginning to copy and paste without fully understanding what the code does. Over time, as they get better at coding, then the code that other people post will make sense.
4. Look at the date for the search results. For languages and libraries that are actively developed, be weary of search results from many years ago.
5. Search github issues and pull request if there are problems with a particular library.
6. Be weary of blogs and sites just repost answers from other blogs and stackoverflow. They are just doing that to get money from Google ads.
7. Read multiple search results. Sometime one explanation will make sense in a way that another explanation will not.
8. If there is a bug in the software, it will often times take looking at multiple search results to fix the bug since the bug can be the result of the setup on a person’s computer.

[samanthacsik]

Random Thoughts (pulled from https://github.com/UCSB-MEDS/DTC-workshop-dev/issues/1):

I've been getting quite a few DMs from students asking me to teach them how to do very specific things with their distill sites. Mostly, I've just had to google around/find examples myself to learn and then relay information. Not sure what a general "how to google" workshop might look, but it's a pretty critical skill that students are going to have to practice a bunch over the next year.

Some resources/ideas:

• line-by-line investigation/debugging (depending on exposure to functions and, in particular, for loops, it might be a great way to show how/why going line-by-line to isolate problem is effective)
• talk about rubber ducky debugging...because I find this more effective than it sounds (I also think it would be super cute to bulk buy rubber ducks to give to each student)
• https://codinginflow.com/google-programming-questions
• how to google errors (and actually isolate the pieces of information on StackOverflow, for example, that are relevant to YOUR problem)
• restarting R can be a lifesaver
• making a list of easy-to-check-first potential errors (spelling, missing commas, data types)
• writing pseudocode
• https://masalmon.eu/2021/07/13/code-detective/

[samanthacsik]

From Christine Parisek:

Typing [r] in front of the search phrase helps to pull up only #rstats related results — that’s my favorite code googling tip.

— Christine Parisek (@caparisek) September 15, 2021

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[samanthacsik]

https://github.com/jennybc/debugging#readme

[samanthacsik]

My new favorite product: https://twitter.com/cassidoo/status/1442936000578154498?s=20

https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/09/28/become-a-better-coder-with-this-one-weird-click/?fbclid=IwAR2mw9bezcKCxf9yng9E64wJUZdnKDLAOeftMV1LpqCRwy_iM0aM4Ezw91Q