Today I learned that if you replace code that’s held together by other code serving the role of duct tape with actual good code but forget to remove the metaphorical duct tape, the good code still doesn’t work.

I learn a lot of ggplot2 responding to reviewers’ suggestions about plots and a lot of CSS helping students with their questions about Twine games. Turns out I only learn code when I have a project that forces me to.

One of those afternoons where I’m auditing someone’s analysis code, but it’s an analysis of 4M rows of data, so I’m also doing spurts of grading while I wait for code to execute.

Today’s manuscript revision fun is detangling the results of a coding error that left out 3 hours and 56 minutes worth of tweets from my analysis. Just enough to make some very small differences in reported results.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Nothing reminds me as much of teaching French as does teaching programming. It takes a lot of the same metacognition to learn both, and it’s really hard to teach that metacognition.