Is there a need for a paid course or a guide on "How to use Tinderbox?"

Firstly some $Gratitude…

  • Mark Bernstein for creating this program which I have deeply enjoyed learning over many years

  • Mark Anderson for lots of course( but especially for tweaking a file in 2020 which I used to capture fast changing information, outputing same to html for a dispersed group of clinicians dealing with Covid )

  • Michael Becker for recent infectious enthusiasm and code related to creating new notes around terms, acronyms and links which I have incorporated into my daily GTD TBX and which has been very helpful

  • The Meet-up gang - I look forward to watching the Vimeo vids each week and hope to be able to join in someday - it feels like watching familiar friends!

  • This forum … so responsive and respectful to all levels of ability

So thank you…

Secondly an offer and an idea

Despite my first name I remain very much to the left on the spectrum of TBX expertise established by the Mark-Meisters. However, I am not at the beginning either and use TBX daily for my work ( building teams/communicating with teams and trying to keep track of threads of ideas/conversations from myriad meetings and collate same when needed to make arguments for change)

I would be happy to have short zoom meets with anyone starting out in TBX as a way of contributing to this community ( I am on GMT time )

Lastly, I wondered whether the concept of a weekly challenge would be helpful?
ie Build a small file that does the following x,y,z - particularly good solutions could be dissected on the meet-up as a short standing item perhaps and common errors highlighted? And on the forum of course

Best Wishes

Mark

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I like the “weekly challenge” idea, but maybe a little less frequently, to give folks time to fit the challenge into their schedule. It would be interesting to see how the same problem can be addressed differently -– other than obvious syntactic errors, there’s almost never a right way or wrong way to do anything in Tinderbox.

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Yes! What about a monthly or quarterly challenge - if they are interesting and demanding (which would make them interesting both for those trying to meet them and those studying the offered solutions), many would need a bit of time. But I think it’s a great idea!

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I really like the challenge idea, as it also allows for further learning form submissions: there is rarely one right way. Plus it gives us exploratory models for further exploration, i.g. improving efficiency.

If this idea goes ahead, it will also help if people are willing to contribute sets of raw notes upon which to base challenges. My experience of demo making is the best ones start with real data. Making up test data is hard; it’s generally too uniform or too noisy. Using notes (with $Name, $Text and optionally some outline structure) it is also easy to build in some edge cases notes to help explore the challenge.

But, all goo challenges of this type generally start with a dataset of sorts. so, another way people can contribute is to make such sets of starting data. It might even be external files (TXT, RSS, etc.) if the challenge were to related to import and mapping.

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Archive.zip (51.2 KB)
I’ve used Scrivener’s auto name generator to create two columns of names ( double-barrelled surnamed managers and single surname employees) and generated random salaries, age and date columns for the employee and a random company name.

There are 500 entries

The zip has a csv and xls files

Should be useful for practising Importing, adding columns to auto-create prototypes, sorting, query practice selecting subgroups (company x with salaries > x etc… )

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Thank you @Markoconnor -– did you have a challenge in mind for using the data?

Ok I’ll have a go

  • Create a tbx file from the data that creates all managers and employees as a built in Person Prototype

  • Add $Attributes that capture age, company, salary inside the Person Prototype

  • Managers and Employees are to have different badges

  • Background outline colour to be different if Age >50

  • Create an Agent that picks out the company with the most employees

  • Create a ‘dashboard’ note that displays the average salary of all employees

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I’d definitely be interested in participating in a paid course. However, it would need to be structured thoughtfully that would allow sufficient time for “students” to absorb the information and put the lessons into practice.

I think “homework” would be a a good addition too. However, that would depend on our capacity to find the time to complete the tasks, and yours to mark it and provide feedback!

That’s my tuppence-worth

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Here you go. Challenge accepted.

TBX L - May 2022 Challenge Becker.tbx (1.5 MB)

I can’t wait to see the other approaches that people come up with to address this challenge.

I agree. I am creating a six-week cohort course. Hope to launch something in August. It will include homework, tests, etc.

[admin] I just closed out this thread(Tinderbox Monthly/Quarterly Challenge) at @satikusala’s request so as to avoid unintended thread spilt/drift. As the ideas raised there may be pertinent, I’ve locked the thread rather than removed it.

So, no foul here, we’re all aligned. Just avoiding thread split. :slight_smile:

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@mwra, I think it would be a good idea to create a separate thread dedicated to @Markoconnor May/June challenge; since we are nearing June, maybe we call it the June Challenge. Start with the challenge and the data set provided. Once the new thread is up we can post my response to the challenge.

Agreed. Late here and full day way tomorrow, so feel free to start it. I think we’re generally agreed on the shape of things.

Mark, I found the list from the closed poll , useful. Not so much from the perspective of future challenges, but from the perspective of what things would people like to do with Tinderbox or what aspects of TB are giving users difficulty. I think this would give Michael Becker some feedback on material for his paid course.

Taking it a step further, what would be some common themes of data management that these challenges present?

Would it be useful to have a thread …
What things do you do with TB ?
What things would you like to do with TB?

Yes, this was my original intention for creating the poll to get feedback on people’s priorities. As my attempt at this poll did not work out, maybe someone else can take a stab at it.

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aTbref is something I have open and ready to search for the right resource, but I have to admit that I often find myself getting lost. I think a “sub-course” or best practices thread on the forum of how to make most efficient use of aTbref would be helpful. I am not suggesting comprehensive coverage or anything of the sort, but rather a simple and basic “guide for the perplexed”…

If you haven’t already, read and work through the two PDF tutorials in the Tinderbox Help menu. They will lead you through the basics, and you can use aTbRef to look things.

FWIW, the the quick links top and bottom of every aTbRef point to likely the most immediately useful parts of the reference.

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Thanks Mark – As they say, been there, done that, but still does not prevent me from getting off track in search of the right path to solve my problems. I suspect what I am looking for is something like the challenges as examples.

Melvin, you’re spot on. For me, the big aha–aka breakthrough–was to refactor the way I view things. Everything is metadata, i.e. value of attributes. A note name is nothing but metadata, a string value. Text two is metadata a string value. Then you have another type of metadata, numbers, lists, sets, dictionaries, etc. A note is a lot like a stem cell, it is a universal sale that has the potential to be anything. As you encode the values of the note you specialize it - e.g, a reference, a person, an entity, whatever you want. You can then use action code to manipulate the values of the attributes, to move data back and forth between notes, to add to it, subtract to it, etc. You can then use export code (inc. HTML, CSS) to format it and display the value of your metadata in any way you want.

Once I figure this out, I then looked at all the action code and export code simply as tools for value management and transformation. I’ve learned that I can take these values and stick them wherever, I want, change them and present them however I like. I’ve then learned that I can interface Tidnerbox with other applications to make additional transformations, e.g., use Pandoc to output to Word, or dynamically transform citations.

I’m not saying that any of this is straightforward or intuitive. It it all starts with this key insight.

Not to worry, my course is coming…with challenge examples. Can you help me? Please list 5~10 things you’d like to do, the outputs you want from your data so that I can work on some challenges for you.

I think debugging tools and/or error messages in Tbx’s action and export languages would go a long way in helping to make it more user-friendly.

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