By Corné de Groot & Max Carter-Brown | June 1, 2026
SORTEE Code Club Debrief: February - April 2026
The Member Engagement Committee runs Code Club every month. Timing can vary, depending on the hosts’ availability and will be announced at least one week in advance on SORTEE’s Slack. Corné de Groot & Max Carter-Brown will be co-hosting Code Club in 2026-27. For more information, see SORTEE’s Code Club page.
February: SORTEE Code Club kick-off meeting
Tuesday, 24th of February: We kicked off SORTEE’s first Code Club of the New Year, and welcomed several new faces! We started off by explaining what Code Club is all about – providing an informal setting where people can learn and share coding practices useful for anything related to open science and reproducible research. Through a questionnaire, we learned that the majority of the Code Club attendants were avid R users and spent a good amount of their work day coding. Next, the proposed themes for the 2026 session were ranked, so we got a good idea of what people wanted to learn about. We also got some audience suggestions for sessions that we worked into the 2026 schedule.
March: Git II
Friday, 20th of March: We hosted a follow up session for our 2025 training session on Git, which is a version control system that tracks changes in code, allows multiple developers to collaborate on projects and revert to previous versions of the code, if something breaks. In this hacky hour, aptly named Git II, we provided further details about using Git to track changes across code so we avoid naming our scripts ‘final_version_final_3.R’. In a live coding session, we demonstrated several useful commands to navigate the Git command line using Gitbash, and had an interactive discussion about using Git for research projects.
April: Modular coding & pipelines
Tuesday, 28th of April: We hosted a training session about modular codes and pipelines in R and Bash. Modular code concerns many techniques that break down code into smaller independent and reusable parts. This can help prevent copy-pasting chaos in code (we have all been guilty of that at some point), and making our scripts more comprehensible and clearer to understand. Custom functions, and loops are great examples of modular code. Modular code can be connected with coding pipelines, like dplyr pipes, sourcing scripts and | pipes in Bash, providing great tools to generate output cleanly.
What’s next?
The next SORTEE Code Club session will be on Tuesday, May 19th at 15:00 UTC where Dr. Cecilia Baldoni will show you how to create your own academic website using Quarto. The 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.