How to Start Your Own Code Club — Community Guide

Welcome to the SORTEE open guide to starting and running a Code Club. This guide was written by and for the SORTEE and broader coding community during the SORTEE Conference 2025.

What is this guide about?

This guide collects real experiences, tested strategies, and participant-contributed tips from the SORTEE 2025 Unconference session "How to Start Your Own Code Club."

This guide provides:

• Practical advice on launching and running a Code Club
• Real tips from facilitators and participants across universities or research institutes, and online communities
• Session formats ideas (seminars, workshops, hacky hours) and how to choose what fits your group
• Solutions to common challenges like balancing skill levels, finding session ideas, or sustaining motivation
• Resources and links to existing materials and community examples

It's a living document! Any contributions or improvements are always welcome (see CONTRIBUTING) .

Related Resources

• SORTEE (Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) — Organization dedicated to improving research practices in ecology and evolution
• SORTEE Code Club — Repository with materials from past Code Club events
• Unconference Session Slides from the October 2025 unconference

Repository Structure

start-your-codeclub-guide
│
├── index.qmd # Quarto Markdown source for the guide
├── styles.scss # custom SCSS styling
├── _quarto.yml # project configuration
├── docs/ # Rendered HTML site for GitHub Pages
│
├── README.md # This file
├── CONTRIBUTING.md # Guidelines for contributors
├── LICENSE # CC BY 4.0 License

How to Contribute

We warmly welcome contributions! You can:

• Fix typos or improve clarity — open a pull request with your edits
• Add new tips, examples, or resources — share what worked (or didn't) in your own Code Club
• Report issues or suggest topics — open an issue to discuss ideas or missing sections
• Adapt for your institution — fork this repo, customize for your community, and share back what you learn

See CONTRIBUTING for detailed instructions on how to propose changes, render the site locally, and collaborate.

Building the Guide Locally

This guide is built using Quarto.

Prerequisites

• Install Quarto

Steps

1. Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/SORTEE/start-your-codeclub-guide.git
cd start-your-codeclub-guide

2. Render the site:

quarto render

3. Preview locally:

quarto preview