 Hey, folks. I don't know if you can tell, but I am just over the moon totally happy. Why am I happy? Well, this channel has gone over what I thought was a pretty lofty goal of 10,000 subscribers. I know to many people, like MrBeast or whoever, 10,000 subscribers is not that big of a deal. But I'm a professor. I talk about coding. No one's going to get excited watching me talk about reproducible research practices. And so that's just, again, why it just warms my heart to know that 10,000 of you, for whatever reason, decided to subscribe. I know that there's far more than that, even, that have watched this channel. The metrics that YouTube gives me tells me close to about 50,000 people over the last month, the last 28 days, have watched some part of my video. Perhaps it's just three seconds, but still 50,000 people. I have never taught that many people in a course ever in my history of teaching. Also, over the last month, I've had people watch a total of 4,000 hours just in the last month of my content. Depending on how you count a semester, that's basically me teaching a 100-person course over a month. Again, I've never taught a class with 100 people and much less every month. And so that's just really eye-opening to me and has really made me excited to come twice a week as I've been doing to talk to you again about reproducible research practices. It's really transformed really how I think about education. Do I think it's going to replace a college? No. I don't think YouTube can replace college, but can it supplement it? Definitely. There were two reasons why I started this channel. The first, as you might recall, is at the beginning of the pandemic, everybody was locked away at home and couldn't get into their research labs. And so I said, hey, you know, let's try to make some videos. In some of those first videos, I know the quality was pretty horrible, but, you know, we kind of figured things out and came into our own rhythm. So I think giving you something to do during the beginning of the pandemic really helped a lot of people. And I hope it continues to help people as they go along. And I know that I get really positive feedback and I'm just really grateful for that. The second reason is that I teach workshops and I know that the data on workshops, not just my workshop, but anybody's workshops is pretty abysmal. People go, they take a workshop, they think, oh, that was the best thing ever. And, you know, they report just really great satisfaction. But you go ask those people a month later, six months later, you know, could you make a plot for me? In general, what people find, what researchers find, is that people don't learn anything from the workshops. And so that's really frustrating, right? And so I don't like that, right? I don't like charging people to take a workshop knowing that they're not going to make the most of the content just because of human psychology, right? So what I thought was, well, I'll make videos where I can have people continue to be immersed in reproducible research practices, continue to be immersed in using ggplot and dplyr and all the great tools that I teach in my workshops. And that way, then, they're constantly being exposed to the language, if you will, right? And so I haven't done any research on this to know, but I have to think that if you've taken over my workshops or if you've taken any course in our get or anything over the years, I've come in and watched my videos that, again, you're getting immersed in that conversation and you're able to kind of latch on ideas to things that you've learned about in the past, kind of strengthening those connections and helping you to remember the content all the better. So there's two different models that I have seen for teaching programming. One model I think is a pretty traditional computer science model where you learn all sorts of different types of data, structures for those data, ways of controlling flow through a program, and then eventually by like chapter eight, you put it all together and you maybe make something useful, right? Well, when I teach, if you look at my online materials like the minimal R, the general R materials, I try to start at the top, right? So here's a chunk of code to make a figure. Well, we can start to change that we can riff on that, hence the name of this channel, right? We can riff on that code to get something different. We can begin to think about how we can adapt that code for our own purposes. So as I was thinking about hitting this milestone of 10,000 subscribers, I realized that this channel has evolved to take on a third approach. Really, that's me telling you about things that I think are cool, things that I'm learning as I go through this stuff. I did not know Snakemake or Kanda before I started filming these videos, right? That's something that people in my lab had been nagging me to do. But anyway, this channel, and many people have told me this, this channel is like a fire hose, right? I am just throwing out content, right? You know, half an hour, twice a week. And you might not be ready for the content that I'm giving you, right? But you can watch these videos, you know, twice a week. And I think you start to absorb different bits of content, right? So it took me a while to start talking about what a pipe actually was, right? But I think you would figure out what a pipe was eventually, yeah? I don't know if I've actually ever talked about what group by does yet. Again, if you watch enough videos, you figure out what group by does. And so my hope is that by this third model of the fire hose approach, right? Or immersion, if you will, that you begin to pick up the concepts that I'm teaching. And so, again, I try to approach this teaching from a project based perspective. I'm not giving you typically toy data sets, not giving you empty cars and telling you how to work with it. I'm giving you a project that's interesting to me. And I am then sharing that with you. So finally, I just want to put this out there that I am so grateful to each and every one of you who has watched these videos over the past two and a half years and all 10,000 of you who have subscribed and all the people that will subscribe in the future. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The reality is that I get many requests from people wanting to join my lab as a graduate student or as a postdoc. I suspect they don't really care what I do, but they want to learn these skills. And so my hope is that although I can't have you all join my lab, I have maybe four or five people in my lab at any given time, that by watching these videos and by being part of this community, you will feel in some way that you are part of my lab, right, that you are receiving training from me. And that frankly humbles me greatly. And so I am very grateful that you would think that I am somebody worth listening to. I've already gone on way too long in this video talking about myself and talking about this channel. But please know that from the bottom of my heart, I am so grateful to each and every one of you for watching this. I can't believe how far we have gotten 10,000 subscribers I don't know if I can average 10,000 a year going forward. That would take me another nine years to get to 100,000. But you know, maybe we'll speed things up a little bit and can we get more subscribers? And hopefully we'll hit that 100,000 in the next couple of years. I think that would be pretty awesome. And I think that would be really good for society and really good for science if we were all just a little bit better at doing data science and doing it in a way that's more reproducible. Thanks again and we'll see you next time for another episode of Code Club.