Prompt:
Asking good questions is a valuable skill to have - asking questions in an online setting is both easier and harder than asking questions in person: we can prepare to ask a question but we are also expected to prepare. The links posted here give some advice on how to ask good questions:
stackoverflow’s Asking a good question
minimal complete verifiable example, minimal reproducible example
Follow these links and read through the advice given, then
- Pick at least one question from stackoverflow or the R help and answer it.
Write a blog post answering the following questions:
- Document which question you answered (link to your answer).
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75241167/looping-through-r-dataframe-columns/75241265#75241265
- Relate your experience of answering the question to your reading.
Choosing a question to answer and actually trying to answer it helped me understand how important a minimal reproducible example is. I also appreciated the informative titles of questions. Both helped me quickly assess if a question was something I could solve using my own experience and made me want to answer their questions more, making clear to me why the readings have such guidelines for posting questions.
The question I chose to answer was relatively simple with only 6 lines of code. However, when trying to answer their question, I realized that their example was not reproducible for others because they didn’t include a dataset that corresponded to their variable in the code. I ended up creating my own little example to try to understand what their issue was. In doing so, I also realized that, as the readings said, making a minimal reproducible example isn’t always that hard and that trying to make one can help you think through your bug as well.
Instructions to follow.