Question sources

From out internal Open Workspace Meeting (OWM) in the Parcels group on 11-01-2022, we committed to provide a code snipped-oriented FAQ to showcase and address commonly occurring from e.g. students and new group members. In this regard, we want to provide a consistent databse of snippets that help people to get started on particular issues, culling the learning curve and avoid code replication delays where possible.

We determined that, for this goal, a more up-to-date FAQ is the best format. We already have an FAQ on the website, but this is rather short and doesn't lend itself well to >20 questions in its current, non-database-backed HTML format. For most group members, adding information here on Github is easier than adding things in HTML on the website FAQ.

Now, the question is: where do we start ? how to we get a good question coverage ? where do we get all the questions from that our code snippets answer ? Here are now some hints on where we can get questions and frequently occurring issues:

• students and student surveys: All senior members can ask their students to provide them with the code questions or add their questions (in a structured format) to the FAQ directly. Alternatively, we can create a survey for questions to our students in one of the next OWM's.
• Parcels examples: the Parcels tutorials on the webpage and examples in the main github repository demonstrate larger examples of Parcels that include many individual issues (and how to solve them). This is cool to get started with less of a focus, or demonstrate a larger subject. That said, those examples are hard to parse for answering individual small issues. We can go through those examples, see which individual issues they address, write out those issues as questions in the FAQ, and then either link to the respective tutorial or extract a particular snippet for this repository.
• Official Parcels FAQ: the official FAQ is not really an FAQ, rather a Knowledge Base, because it doesn't state any (simple) questions. Still, it is a great source of knowledge, so to the least we refer to it for answers in this FAQ, but we can also reformulate those topics and and infos into specific questions.
• Python for Lunch (PFL) talks: At IMAU, we already collected a large database on special-issue tutorials with distinct examples that would be helpful to the community. They also state and address individual issues, which we can again reformulate as questions for the database and then interconnect with github.
• Parcels issue tracker: looking at the Parcels issue tracker - especially include also closed issues - provides a wealth of frequently-occurring issues with lots of repetition in that database. Thus, also here we can reformulate some of the frequent issues as questions for the FAQ and either link to the scripts posted as answers to the issues, or create a code snippet that answers the question.
• Parcels code reviews: our group members have provided some very nice code snippets already to demonstrate the treatment of smaller issues in a compact format. Those issues can again be formulated as questions to our database. Then, we can either link the question to the provided PR, finalize and improve the related PR (nice motivation to return to those codes and wrap 'em up) or extract those PR scripts as snippets in this repository.
• Utrecht Team's wiki: we already have a nice internal wiki, which we can use as source for Q-'n-A's.