Obviously, that was an exciting turn of events. Not long after that, and slightly to my horror ( please don’t go looking at my JavaScript code), Hadley submitted an issue. I made a cool intro-slash-docs presentation and would probably have sat on it for a while longer if it weren’t for Mara Averick who spotted my GitHub activity and soft-announced the package for me. I cobbled together an R package that was a fairly decent R interface around a collection of lines of JavaScript that I barely understood, that somehow assembled into an actual working timer. After all it’s not like you have to end the timer, you can always just move on in your slides. I also wanted to make it easy to adjust the time, but my JavaScript skills were limited to what I could learn from StackOverflow, so I compromised and decided that you could only bump the timer up. So my idea was to build a countdown timer that you could drop into a slide and easily use to time an event. This is pretty normal an instructor probably has a sense of approximately how long an activity will take and we’ll often will adjust the time spent on the activity based on how the audience is doing, how well the material is working, or how close to lunch or a break we are in the session. One funny thing I noticed during our workshop session was that Garrett would frequently have to switch to slide-edit mode (in Keynote, I think) to fiddle with the timer as he adjusted the length of the “your turn” session. Garrett used timers extensively to pace break out sessions and they worked surprisingly well to keep everyone on track. These two inspirations came together in my first post-conf project: a countdown timer for xaringan slides.Ī slide from Garrett’s workshop materials with a 4-minute timer in the lower right corner. (Although I don’t think I’m alone in this kind of realization this year many people left rstudio::conf(2022) thinking that it’s time to learn Python.) An odd thing to take away from an R conference, yes. I also walked away from rstudio::conf(2019) with another key take away: it was time to learn JavaScript. That workshop specifically marked a turning point in my career and I left rstudio::conf very inspired to build and teach cool things in R. In 2019 I went to rstudio::conf in Austin, TX where a highlight of the conference, for me, was the Train-the-Trainer: Tidyverse Track workshop by Garrett Grolemund and Greg Wilson. I hope you don’t mind indulging me (or skip ahead if you’d rather get right to business). Options( repos = c( gadenbuie = '', CRAN = '' )) install.packages( 'countdown') A brief history of countdownīefore we talk about all the new things in countdown, I want to take a small minute to get nostalgic.
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