Reasons

R-bloggers does like Medium, since Medium will only share an excerpt of the post with a link to the rest. R-bloggers wants the whole post. Fair enough.

Its extra work, but I like the idea of being able to work within my own development environment. And instead of having to learn a bunch of keyboard shortcuts, I can write code and execute commands and push updates via Jekyll.

Example

Since I’m bothering to post this on Medium, I thought I’d get some use out of it. I’ll show how I did it as a post on my new blog.

Here’s a code chunk to round out my porting example

# test code
nothing_special <- function(a){
    return(a)
}

Here’s a screenshot of a random bit of the code from the R package I’m writing to show how the images are handled.

See you over at data-steve.github.io.

That’s what it feels like sometimes when trying to share code snippets on Slack. Sure, it’s easy to drop some code on there; but getting it out?

Caveat Coder

That inviting little question, “Create a Snippet?”… You know the one that automagically appears when you go to paste in a code chunk into the chatbox?

It’s a trap. You’ll be 3 steps into waiting for your browser to view the code before you get that snippet back out.

Options

I think it’s easier to wrap your code in block-code markdown using a pair of triple-backticks ```, like so :

```
fantastic_function(sth)
```

There’s still sometimes problems with selecting the code back out of a markdown block (no matter how you stab at it with your steely … touchpad), in that those trailing backticks can sometimes find their way into your code. But it’s still faster than the snippet functionality (at present) and more prettified than just dropping the code chunk in as raw text.

Get In Line Here

Slack’s a great productivity tool, which I use all day, everyday at work; and I’ve already sent them a comment regarding this. Their customer service was super prompt, assuring me they’ll thinking about this.

I’m taking this nod towards code snippets as the start of good things. But I’m still exploring other options than current functionality for sharing code. If you have any ideas, send ’em my way at @data_steve