Reflections: Sprint 1

Sprint 1: “Create presentations from Markdown

The process:

  1. Started with ioslides from YiHui’s book
  2. Figured out why the simplest slide I wanted to do was impossible to do in ioslides (Yihui says that not me!)
  3. His suggested alternative Xaringan, which was originally a stretch goal, became the focus almost immediately thereafter
  4. Did a small number of exercises every morning before I started work, following the the book, and then went down the rabbit hole to the remark Github repo that Yihui linked to, to understand a bit more about the way formatting works.
  5. Practiced pushing the code from within RStudio or iTerm to a Github repo. Messed up a couple of times and learnt how to reset HEAD
  6. Created my first (basic ludicrously plain) presentation (Rmd document) entirely from Markdown of some key points I made from Richard Hamming’s amazingly wonderful speech at Bell Labs called “You and Your Research“.
  7. Created a second Rmd presentation – this time turning gnab’s remark pages into a preso for myself.

The problem? I can only serve those presentations from RStudio, locally. If I wanted to share the slides themselves, I have more work to do. That will become a learning goal for Sprint 2:  How to embed this presentation, not merely a link to the Rmd.  I found an excellent article here and another one to go through here.

Also:

Despite the crash course in CSS & HTML, knowing the names of a tiny fraction of the functions and features in them is utterly frustrating. I need to get one of the lads to show me how this whole stack actually works.