I’m looking forward to reading Alice in Wonderland to my daughter some day.

I honestly don’t remember a lot of the book, but there is a scene at the beach where the Mock Turtle is teaching key subjects:

“Reeling and Writhing of course, to begin with,’ the Mock Turtle replied, ‘and the different branches of arithmetic-ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision.”

― Lewis Carroll, Alice In Wonderland: Including Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland And Through The Looking Glass

I remember this scene from Alice in Wonderland when I learned a new acronym: MRE for Minimum Reproducible Example today. Along with the other keys subjects we need to learn perhaps one of the most important is how to ask for help.

If you go to Stack Overflow or anywhere to request help debugging your code, make sure you have reproducible steps others can follow without having to download your proprietary data.

People want to help

Providing a MRE (or the R package Reprex file)

1) makes it easier for someone to help you &

2) it also means that if the solution to your issue gets published using public data (especially datasets that come standard in the package you’re using) then when someone searches for a solution in the future they are more likely to benefit from what someone told you.

Lewis Carrol was a mathematician. I think if he lived in modern times MRE would be among the Mock Turtles lessons.