Learn how to program like a professional: boost your R skills and get set on the path to best coding practices at Mirai’s workshop Think like a programmeR.
Scripting and being a programmer are not the same thing. Your spaghetti code, despite working now, will be a nightmare to maintain, debug or detangle if you need to change something. How many times have you changed one little innocent thing somewhere and then discovered a major consequence way down the road? Or has it ever happened to you to have to modify a colleague’s script and being completely at a loss?
To avoid all this, all you need to do is to change your mindset when programming:
- Modularize your code and separate concerns as much as possible,
- If you are about to copy paste something, think twice: that should be a function!
- Put in place unit and integration tests ensuring that everything keeps working as expected whenever you make a change.
- Document what your code is meant to be doing, what are the parameters and what formats is expected; meaningful variables and function names definitely help.
- Spend some thought in designing before diving into coding.
- Do not reinvent the wheel if a standard functionality is available.
It all sounds reasonable and easy, but we both know that putting it in practice is another story. R has a reputation to have a steep learning curve and you might feel at some point like giving up. Don’t let your code control yourself, don’t get stuck! Join us instead on Tuesday November 10th at 14:00 CET, and learn from the experts the best practices of working with R and the techniques to use in enterprise.
To know more about working like a professional programmer, have a look at this article and afterwards register for our workshop to learn how to put those principles in practice.