index.qmd

---
title: "Coding Café"
subtitle: "Steno Diabetes Center Aarhus and Aarhus University"
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Welcome to the Coding Café at the [Steno Diabetes Center
Aarhus](https://www.stenoaarhus.dk/forskning/) (SDCA) and the
[Department of Public Health at Aarhus University](https://ph.au.dk/)
(AU-PH).

The Coding Café is a place for anyone working at SDCA and/or AU-PH to
get assistance with **coding** in R (and maybe other languages like
Python in the future). The only prerequisite so far is that you have had
some type of introduction to R, preferably through a course such as
[this](https://r-cubed-intro.rostools.org/) one offered by the Danish
Diabetes and Endocrinology Academy.

The sessions are open and one can join in and out at anytime during the
allotted time. There will be two instructors with experience working in
R. We also highly encourage the participants to interact with each
other - maybe there is someone in the group that has the solution to
your problem.

During the sessions there will be free cake and coffee/tea - or whatever
is appropriate for the time of the day. For the sessions at the
Department of Public Health, Aarhus University, please write an email to
[dbi\@ph.au.dk](mailto:dbi@ph.au.dk) or
[jiezh\@ph.au.dk](mailto:jiezh@ph.au.dk) 1 week before to ensure there
is cake for you. You are always free to join whether you have registered
or not.

## Upcoming schedule

```{r tbl-schedule}
#| tbl-cap: "Upcoming dates, times, and locations for the Café sessions."
schedule <- read.csv(here::here("data", "schedule.csv"))
knitr::kable(schedule)
```

## Practical information

### Things to do before asking for help

Being a good coder in R does not necessarily mean that one just sits
down and writes a lot of code like writing a piece of text. Even
experienced R users search online for code. The great thing about R is
that there is often multiple solutions to a coding problem. What often
separates an experienced user from a new user is that the experienced
user know what to search for, where to search and understand the
replies.

We suggest that you try to search on either Google or directly in
[Stackoverflow](https://stackoverflow.com/). As a next step, it can be
useful to use AI-tools like ChatGPT-3 but beware that it can make up
functions and that it does not always work.

There are suggestions to try before asking a question.

### Asking a clear coding question

Some issues are simple such as I cannot download this package. Other
times what you want to do is more complex and needs a bit of background
for a person outside your project to understand what you want to do.
Therefore, you need to prepare and provide the context to the person you
are asking for help. This could be in the form of showing the structure
of your dataset, which functions you used, and what you have tried so
far.

### Note about sensitive data

Many of us work with very sensitive data - especially those working in
Denmark's Statistics (DST). If you are working on DST, or something
similar where you are not allowed to show the data to enyone else, you
need to prepare your question a bit more. We recommend that you find an
example dataset that looks similar to the dataset you work with and make
a coding example.

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