Conventions

How this site is maintained, and the R and Quarto habits the course grades on

Maintaining this site

The site is a Quarto website whose content comes from three CSVs. The loop for any update is the same loop the course teaches: edit, render, read the diff, verify, commit, push.

To change	Edit	Then
A deadline’s state or a note	data/deadlines.csv	render, push
An activity’s status, owner or dates	data/activities.csv	render, push
How a week went	data/weeks.csv (status, progress_note)	render, push
The roster, topic, account owners, contributions	context-bank/team.qmd	render, push
A new dev log entry	new folder devlog/posts/YYYY-MM-DD-slug/index.qmd with title, description, author, date, categories	render, push
The critical-path diagram	the two {mermaid} blocks in tracker/critical-path.qmd (the float table is computed)	render, push

Rendering: open the repo folder in Positron (File, Open Folder, the folder itself), then in the terminal run quarto render. The output goes to docs/ because _quarto.yml sets output-dir: docs, and GitHub Pages serves main /docs, so docs/ is committed along with the source: a source change that is not re-rendered does not reach the site. quarto preview gives a live local preview while editing.

Statuses used in the CSVs: Not started, In progress, Done, Blocked, Dropped for activities; Upcoming, In progress, Submitted, Graded, Done, Missed, Dropped for dated items and weeks.

R and Quarto habits from the course

• Open folders, not files: Positron sets the working directory to the opened folder, so relative paths work. On this site _quarto.yml also sets execute-dir: project, so every page reads data with file.path("data", "file.csv") from the repo root.
• Paths with file.path(), relative to the opened folder. Never change the working directory from code, never absolute paths, never here() in student files.
• No .Rproj files; the course templates ship them and the instruction is to ignore them.
• Every report renders cleanly before it is committed; a .qmd that does not render is not submitted.
• Charts: informative titles that state the finding, real axis labels, a source caption, white background, direct labels where possible (the my-chart-style skill from week 2 encodes this).
• Ask the agent for code, not answers; keep the data, script, figure pipeline; sanity-check row counts, duplicates, NA handling and totals yourself.

Git habits

Commit messages say what changed and why (“Add pilot power analysis”, not “update”). Pull before push when someone else may have pushed. Never force-push, never rewrite main. Nothing personal and no credentials in this repo: it is public.

Working with an agent in this repo

CLAUDE.md in the repo root is the standing brief for Claude Code (or any agent) opened in this folder. It says what the site is, how to render it, what to edit for each kind of change, and the privacy line. Read it, then this context bank, before making changes; after a session, write a dev log entry and update the activity statuses.