Rethinking the Lesson Pipeline

If you had a look at CarpentryCon’s program, you might know that I will be facilitating two sessions: “Contributing on GitHub” on Wednesday, 30 May and “Bring and Build Your Own Lesson ‘Carpentries-style’” on Friday, 1 June. During the process to organise both sessions, I have ben thinking a lot of what we could improve in the way that we write our lessons. One of the things that I know that annoys many of the maintainers is the fact that they need to copy and paste the output of each command. RStudio has been work in a new project called reticulate that “enables easy interoperabilty between Python and R chunks” and in this process they have made it much easier to use Python from R Markdown.

I created one pull request to swcarpentry/lesson-example with an concept idea of using reticulate. The pull request includes some screenshots of Bash and Python code chunks being processed by R Markdown. This is one discussion that all members of the community are welcome to participate in, so please leave a comment on the pull request or, even better, find me during CarpentryCon to talk about it, if you are at what promises to be a great conference.