Craft is a complicated web of skills
What’s it mean to be a good woodworker? It’s an endless list of skills about how wood works, how to use certain tools, how to design and put pieces together. For a writer it’s skill with the use of language, research, storytelling, planning. To become good at the craft, you need to build up all those interrelated skills to the point where they function as a distinguishable whole (View Highlight)
Note: Love this. Love woodworking
Mastery of the craft only comes from practical experience. The only way you can get better at writing, translating, woodworking, or doing data analysis, is to actually do it (View Highlight)
Craft is also about community
Over the course of history, practitioners of crafts group together, whether in actual guilds, unions, and professional societies, or more informally like writing circles. Putting aside the socio-economic reasons for gathering together, one other function of such groups is to share and spread advice, feedback, and experiences amongst the members. Because crafts take practice, and practice is significantly easier when there is outside feedback available. (View Highlight)
Community is something that the data science community does a pretty good job of as a whole, just see the Rstats community as an example (View Highlight)
Note: R is great about having “vignettes” to show how to use each package
