The Dovetail #8: Updates from The Carpentries Workbench

This is the eighth post in a series that we are calling “The Dovetail”, about the transition to The Carpentries Workbench. In this series, we aim to keep members of The Carpentries community abreast of the current news about the Workbench.

If you are interested in participating in discussions around The Carpentries Workbench, head over to our GitHub Discussions forum: https://github.com/carpentries/workbench/discussions

Beta Phase To Resume

As we enter into the Q4, I am pleased to announce that the long-delayed beta phase will commence from 2022-10-17 until 2023-03-13 with one lesson entering the beta phase per week. Details of the beta phase and the official table of lessons can be found below and on the Workbench Beta Phase page, with explanation of what the different stages of the beta phase will bring.

In brief, the beta phase will run for 12 weeks¹ for each lesson during which a link will appear on the lesson, leading to the same lesson using The Carpentries Workbench. During the beta phase, we will be asking for feedback about your experience with The Workbench in short assessments and will then invite participants to an optional focus group to gather qualitative feedback. The feedback we receive from the assessments and focus group will make sure that The Workbench rollout in 2023-Q2 is smooth.

I will be recording a short video to be distributed next week (and with the next edition of The Dovetail) that will introduce the beta phase and demonstrate what you can expect to see during that phase.

Updates to The Carpentries Workbench

Since 2022-09-28,

• {sandpaper} version 0.10.0 -> 0.10.1
  • Titles inserted into index.md will replace “Summary and Setup”.
• {pegboard} 0.3.2
  • no updates :)
• {varnish} 0.2.4
  • no updates :)

To update your local Workbench installation, open R and use the following code:

# Enable repository from carpentries
options(repos = c(
  ropensci = 'https://carpentries.r-universe.dev',
  CRAN = 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))
# Download and install sandpaper in R
install.packages(c('tinkr', 'pegboard', 'sandpaper', 'varnish'))

Upcoming and Current Lessons in Workbench Beta

List of Lessons to enter Workbench Beta in 2022

Community Lessons

• carpentries-incubator/git-novice-branch-pr—Version Control with Git
• carpentries-incubator/data-management-pipelines-engineering—Data management and analytic pipelines for engineers
• carpentries-incubator/markdown-intro—Introduction to Markdown
• carpentries-incubator/SDC-BIDS-IntroMRI—Introduction to MRI and BIDS
• carpentries-incubator/SDC-BIDS-dMRI—Introduction to dMRI
• carpentries-incubator/SDC-BIDS-fMRI—fMRI Imaging Analysis
• carpentries-incubator/julia-novice—A lesson exploring the Julia language
• carpentries-incubator/R-archaeology-lesson
• carpentries-incubator/python-packaging-publishing—Packaging and Publishing with Python

Participants

• Sara Morsy, Lesson Developer (in The Carpentries Incubator)
• @iramosp, Maintainer
• Jesse Sadler, Maintainer
• Eirini Zormpa, Maintainer
• Robin, Instructor
• Jon Haitz Legarreta Gorroño, Lesson Developer (in The Carpentries Incubator)
• Karen Word, Maintainer
• Luis J. Villanueva, Maintainer
• Jon Wheeler, Lesson Developer (in The Carpentries Incubator)
• Simon Christ, Lesson Developer (in The Carpentries Incubator)
• Maneesha Sane, Instructor
• Sarah Brown, Maintainer
• Joel Nitta, Translator
• Juan Fung, Maintainer
• Jannetta Steyn, Lesson Developer (in The Carpentries Incubator)
• Michael Joseph, Lesson Developer (in The Carpentries Incubator)
• Sarah Stevens, Lesson Developer (in The Carpentries Incubator)
• Kozo Nishida, Lesson Translation (to Japanese)
• François Michonneau, Maintainer
• Jamie Jamison, Maintainer
• Jennifer Stubbs (she/her), Instructor
• Drake Asberry, Maintainer

Tips and Tricks for Using The Workbench

In many of our lessons, we often use errors as teachable moments. Because of this all R lessons will still render a website even if there are errors in the examples, but this is a double-edged sword when unexpected errors happen. If you want to prevent unexpected errors from building a lesson, you can add fail_on_error: true to your config.yaml file and any chunks without an error = TRUE option will cause the build to fail if there is an error.