By Cecilia Baldoni, Saoirse Kelleher, Natalie van Dis, Corné de Groot | October 28, 2025
SORTEE Code Club debrief: Getting started with Shiny: build interactive applications in R - June, 17th 2025
Author: Cecilia Baldoni, Saoirse Kelleher, Natalie van Dis, Corné de Groot
The Member Engagement Committee runs Code Club every third Tuesday of the month. Time can vary depending on the host and will be announced at least two weeks in advance on SORTEE’s Slack. For more information, see SORTEE’s Code Club page.
On October 16th, 2025, a group of Code Club enthusiasts gathered online during the 2025 SORTEE Conference with a simple goal: figure out best practices around peer-learning communities focused on coding and open science.
The session centered on a shared Google Doc where participants could type their thoughts, add emoji reactions, ask questions live, or drop asynchronous comments. The format itself modeled what a good code club looks like—messy and collaborative, with people jumping in to share solutions and build on each other’s experiences. By the end, the document had transformed into a collection of lived experience rather than abstract best practices.
Participants focused on the need for spaces where it’s safe to ask questions, where mistakes are normalized, where you don’t have to pretend to know things you don’t. One participant mentioned navigating science with a disability that makes leaving the house difficult; a code club could be a lifeline for staying connected. Another simply noted: “All the cool kids join code clubs”!
The biggest challenge people identified was managing their own energy so they don’t burn out facilitating. Here as well, participants and facilitators shared their best strategies: start small, admit uncertainty out loud, use live-coding to normalize mistakes, find co-facilitators to share the load. For content, the advice was straightforward: crowdsource topics from participants, invite guest speakers, reuse materials year after year, or fall back on hacky hours that require zero prep. On mixed skill levels, the consensus was clear: mixed experience can be an asset for peer-to-peer learning if advanced participants actively help beginners.
From this great collaborative experience, we created an open guide. It includes everything we discussed during the Unconference: session formats, strategies for different scenarios, practical tips from real facilitators, and list of resources. More importantly, it’s built for contribution, meaning that pull requests and issues are welcome, because code clubs exist everywhere and this guide should reflect that diversity.
If you’ve been curious about starting a code club, the advice is simple: you don’t need to be an expert. Grab a couple of colleagues, try a hacky hour where everyone brings a problem to solve together, meet once a month. See what happens. And when you do, share what you learned. Help keep building this guide into something that actually reflects what’s happening in code clubs around the world!
Check out the [Code Club Guide] and contribute on [GitHub]!
What’s next?
The next Code Club meeting will be on Tuesday, November 18th (zoom link will be posted on SORTEE’s Slack).
You can check the Code Club schedule here for upcoming meetings.
To receive calendar invites in your local time zone, sign up here.
Suggest a topic
To propose a Code Club meeting topic, please use this form.