Reflection prompts
Enter each weeks’ reflections as a separate commit.
The optional prompts are designed to help you track things you learn around the course — concepts you explored independently, LLM interactions you found illuminating or surprising, and judgement calls you made. There are no right answers.
Week 1 — Introduction, CLI & Git basics
What is one CLI command or git concept you looked up or experimented with beyond
what was shown in class? How did you find it, and what does it do?Describe a moment this week where something didn't work as expected (installation,
terminal, git, etc.). How did you diagnose and resolve it — and did you use an LLM
for help? If so, was the answer good?Why do you think version control is described as "intentional friction"? Do you
agree? Write 2–3 sentences from your own perspective.Week 2 — Scripts, Functions & Refactoring
Describe a function you wrote or refactored this week. What did you change, and
what principle guided that decision?Did you ask an LLM to help write or improve a function? Paste the prompt you used
(or reconstruct it). Did you accept the suggestion as-is? If you changed something,
what and why?What is one R function from a package you discovered this week (in lecture,
practical, or on your own) that you hadn't used before? What does it do and when
might it be useful?Week 3 — Debugging
Did you use an LLM to help debug? What did you share with it, and what approach
did it take? Was the answer correct? How did you verify it?What debugging habit or strategy do you want to deliberately practise going
forward? Why that one?Week 4 — Version Control & Collaborative Coding
Describe a confusing or frustrating moment with git this week. How did you resolve
it? What do you now understand that you didn't before?How does committing code frequently change how you think about your work? Have you
noticed yourself structuring tasks differently because of it?Week 5 — Quarto Websites & Collaborative Coding
What is the difference between a Quarto document and a Quarto website project?
Describe in your own words what `_quarto.yml` does and how it changes how you
think about organising a multi-file project.Walk through one `format:` or `execute:` option you set in `_quarto.yml` this week.
Why did you choose that option, and what effect did it have on the rendered output?Describe a situation this week where you used a git branch, stash, or pull request.
What problem were you solving, and would you approach it the same way again?Week 6 — R Packages
Can you think of packages you have used that are very large or very small?
Why do you think they contain many or few functions?How do the ideas of outside-in and inside-out function design relate to package design?`devtools::load_all()` reloads your package without restarting R, whereas
`source()`-ing a file just runs it in the global environment. Did you notice a
difference in behaviour when using `load_all()`? What does it tell you about
how packages work differently from plain scripts?Writing roxygen2 documentation (`@param`, `@returns`, `@examples`) forces you to
describe your function from a user's perspective before you've finished writing it.
Did documenting a function change how you thought about its interface or arguments?Week 7 — Initial Data Analysis & Data Cleaning
What data format or file type did you encounter that was unfamiliar? How did you
read it into R, and what did you learn in the process?Did you ask an LLM about data licensing, provenance, or quality? What question did you ask, and how did you assess whether the answer was trustworthy?Describe one visualisation you made during IDA. What did you learn from it that a summary statistic alone wouldn't have revealed?What question did your data raise that you hadn't anticipated at the start? Do you think it's worth pursuing, and why?Week 9 — Reproducibility, Open Data & renv
Have you set up renv in a project (course or personal)? Describe one dependency
or reproducibility issue it helped you avoid or document — or one challenge you
encountered when getting it to work.Did you use a dataset with an explicit open licence (e.g. CC-BY, ODbL, PDDL)?
What did the licence allow or restrict, and did that affect how you plan to share or cite it in your final project?Describe one documentation gap you discovered in your own or a team member's
analysis — something a future reader could not have reproduced or verified without asking you. How did you (or would you) fill it?