Google Colab demo notebook

[rchurt]

Hi Thomas,

I just made a PR for a draft of a notebook that will let users run this package on a virtual machine, which will let them get going with it quickly. I wanted to open this issue so we can chat about what we want to do with it (if you like the idea)!

Best,
Rob

[tobadia]

Hi Rob,

Definitely a good resource to be in there. I'll try and find the best way to get this to fit in the repo along the R sources, just to keep the "R package" distinct from the "external documentations". If your PR doesn't mess up say R CMD BUILD commands and stuffs like that, that should be OK!
I'm working on this repo on the side so it's taking longer than I would like, apologies.

Best,
Thomas

[rchurt]

Sounds good! I'm happy to add more content to this notebook--certainly let me know if there are any specific features you want to highlight (though you might already have code for this!).

I also think it might be nice to add a separate notebook that uses Python for some data import/cleaning/plotting functions, but uses R for the R0 analysis. This is what I'm primarily doing, and it would help any other users who (like me) are more comfortable with Python, but want to use this tool. Let me know if you think this would be a useful addition and I'll make a new notebook with some code I already have, and we can decide what else to add.

[tobadia]

This sounds like a great addition indeed. My Python is rusty and and I usually do data manipulation in R, but there must be a lot of people who are more proficient in Python for matters like this one and only rely on R for actual "analysis". I'm not sure what the best github-compliant strategy would be here. I'll give it some thoughts!

Any caveat you run into, I'm assuming, would be relevant. After all, it's user feedback that should feed such vignettes!

[rchurt]

Sounds good! I'll try to make a PR with a draft notebook today so you can start looking through it and give feedback.

[rchurt]

OK I threw together a rough draft here: #5

There are a couple minor bugs I'm still working out, but this should let you give high-level feedback. Let me know what you think!

[rchurt]

Regarding a github-compliant strategy for both notebooks, if you'd prefer not to host them in this repo, one option is to host them in another one and add an "open in colab" button to the README so users can just open them and start working with them in a single click.

Just as an example, I made a PR here where I incorporated this into the README for a different notebook that I had lying around, just so you can see what the behavior would be. Just a thought!

[tobadia]

I think it's safe to keep them in that repo, just including them in the .Rbuildignore so that R CMD BUILD or R CMD CHECK pass and ignore them. I'll move forward with merging the PR in the upcoming days, too. Just checking the content first. Cheers.

[rchurt]

Sounds great, I know both of them could use some more work, so let me know if there's anything specific you want me to change!