Aleksandra Nenadic on The Carpentries

Subcommunity Spotlight: UK Carpentry Community

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Subcommunity Profile

The UK Carpentries community brings together people involved in teaching computational research skills, including Carpentry Instructors, helpers, and workshop coordinators.

The community has long-standing links with the Software Sustainability Institute, the well-developed UK RSE landscape, and several RSE groups with a strong interest in training, including the large groups that support the national supercomputing service and organisations like the Met Office. While the first Instructor Trainer Training workshop for the UK community was hosted in 2014, the UK Carpentries was formalised in 2021.

Become a Lesson Developer Trainer

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Do you have experience in lesson/curriculum development? Want to share that expertise with others in The Carpentries community? Interested in helping to build the Carpentries Incubator community? If so, apply to join the upcoming round of Lesson Developer Trainer Training!

What do Lesson Developer Trainers do?

Certified Lesson Developer Trainers teach The Carpentries Collaborative Lesson Development Training to community members who want to learn how to design and develop open source lessons in collaboration with others. They lead training events and join community meetings with other Lesson Developer Trainers to discuss topics relevant to the training and lesson development in general.

Calling for Beta Pilot Workshops: Building Better Research Software

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We recently published a new version of Building Better Research Software, a lesson in The Carpentries Incubator designed to serve as a “next steps” workshop after Software Carpentry. Previously known as FAIR Research Software, the curriculum has undergone significant changes over the last few months, and we are now seeking Carpentries Instructors willing to teach it in their communities and provide feedback to further improve it.

Lesson Profile

Title: Building Better Research Software
Lesson site: https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/better-research-software/
Lesson repository: https://github.com/carpentries-incubator/better-research-software/
Teaching time: The lesson is designed to be taught in two full days or four half days

Learning Objectives

After following the lesson, learners will be able to:

Incubator Lesson Spotlight: Intermediate Research Software Development in Python

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Incubator Lesson Spotlight highlights a lesson under development by our community in The Carpentries Incubator. In this edition, we look at the progress being made on the {{page.lesson_title}} lesson, and hear from the authors about how The Carpentries community can get involved with the ongoing development of this lesson.

Lesson Profile

Title: {{page.lesson_title}}
Lesson Pages: https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/python-intermediate-development/
Lesson Repository: https://github.com/carpentries-incubator/python-intermediate-development

Learning Objectives

After this course, learners should be able to:

Set up and use a suitable development environment together with popular source code management infrastructure to develop software collaboratively
Use a test framework to automate the verification of correct behaviour of code, and employ parameterisation and continuous integration to scale and further automate your testing
Design robust, extensible software through the application of suitable programming paradigms and design techniques
Use a critical, reflective mindset to prepare and release your software for reuse by others
Manage software improvement from feedback through agile techniques

Target Audience

A typical learner is someone who is working in academic research and, needing to write some code, has gained basic software development skills either by self-learning or attending, e.g., a novice Software Carpentry Python course. They have been applying those skills in their domain of work by writing code for some time, e.g. half a year or more. However, their software development-related projects are now becoming larger and are involving more stakeholders, and they now need more intermediate software engineering skills to help them design more robust software code, automate the process of testing and verifying its correctness and support collaborations with others.

Incubator Lesson Spotlight: Building Websites with Jekyll & GitHub Pages

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Lesson Profile

Title: {{page.lesson_title}}
Lesson Pages: https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/jekyll-pages-novice/
Lesson Repository: https://github.com/carpentries-incubator/jekyll-pages-novice

Learning Objectives

After this lesson, learners should be able to:

create formatted page content with Markdown
configure their project to build and serve pages on GitHub
build a coherent site with multiple pages using the Jekyll framework
customise the layout and style of the pages on their site

Target Audience

This lesson guides learners through making websites using Jekyll in a web hosting service GitHub Pages. Anyone comfortable interacting with websites in a web browser and willing to learn how to produce website. Basic understanding of HTML and/or Markdown as webpage authoring languages is welcome but not a must.

Alpha testing a Jekyll Pages lesson

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In the past several months, we have been developing a lesson, Building Websites with Jekyll and GitHub Pages, in The Carpentries Incubator. In November 2020, we taught this material for the first time in two mini-workshops hosted by UW-Madison.

The first time a lesson is taught is always an important step in its development. It is a chance to really assess how well the lesson objectives and material fit the target audience.

It is also usually the first time exercises have been tested by learners, and can expose weaknesses in the material that are difficult to spot from our perspective as a lesson author. In the life cycle of a lesson, The Carpentries refer to these initial trial runs undertaken by lesson authors as alpha pilots.

The Software Sustainability Institute's Guidance for Running Online Training

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally posted on the Software Sustainability Institute’s website based on lessons learned by SSI members.

Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

Introduction

The following is guidance based on the Software Sustainability Institute staff and collaborators running online training events which have become more needed due to the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Steve Crouch has run afternoon training events online for the Scottish response to the Royal Society RAMP COVID initiative; Mario Antonioletti, Lucia Michielin, Aleksandra Nenadic and Giacomo Peru have been running Edinburgh Carpentries events online; Aleksandra Nenadic and Steve Crouch have run and facilitated workshops and instructor training events online. Rachael Ainsworth has excellent online event management experience especially during the recent delivery of Collaborations Workshop 2020 online. Shoaib Sufi has oversight of the Collaborations Workshop series of events and moved the selection of the Institute Fellows from a face to face meeting to a successful online event which has taken place for a number of years now.

Incentives and Benefits of Getting Involved in Teaching Researchers

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Software Sustainability Institute believes in the benefits of open development, sharing and collaborating with a community as well as best practices in openness, crediting, citing and developing research software. What are the benefits for instructors of getting involved in teaching computational research skills and these best practices? And why should institutions allow staff to use some of their time to teach their colleagues and get involved in communities such as The Carpentries?

Extending Gratitude to CarpentryCon 2020's Task Force

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries’ CarpentryCon Task Force exists to organise and deliver the next CarpentryCon - a remarkable global assemblage of Carpentries members and friends. The Task Force started working together on January 22, 2019 and has not looked back! Our major planning milestones have answered these questions; the what, when and where? We are focusing on Growing inclusive, computational communities and leaders, between 29th June and 1st July 2020, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, United States. But beyond this answer, in the planning process, we ended with two top venues, leading to the inception of the annual CarpentryCon cycle from bi-annual, and a planned venue for CarpentryCon 2021 to be a pass-on baton to the next Task Force. Next year’s CarpentryCon has achieved a lot in the planning this year led by Christina and Ouso.

CarpentryConnect Manchester 2019 Highlights

Tue, 30 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post was first published on Software Sustainability Institute’s blog.

Photo by Mario Antonioletti

CarpentryConnect Manchester 2019 took place from 25th to 27th June 2019. For the first two days, we were in a fantastic, modern, vibrant meeting venue – The Studio – at the very heart of Manchester. On the third day, we moved to the University of Manchester’s School of Computer Science, so attendees had an opportunity to see the Oxford Road/North campus after refurbishment too. We’ll publish a detailed CarpentryConnect Manchester 2019 report, but, in the meantime, here are some highlights from the event.

Pilot Survey Focus Group Update

Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

In April 2017, Data Carpentry began to pilot a survey that includes skills-based questions. Check out the blog post about our assessment strategy, and the work involved leading up to this effort.

The survey includes the following statement:

 Please enter a unique identifier as follows: Number of siblings (as numeric) + First two letters of the city you were 
 born in (lowercase) + First three letters of your current street (lowercase). This identifier will be confidential to 
 you and will help us pair your results with the post-assessment.

 Example: If I have 4 siblings, was born in Arlington, and live on Creekwater Street, my unique identifier would be 
 4arcre

This unique identifier is asked of respondents so that our staff can run paired analyses of the pre- and post-survey results to measure significant gains post-workshop.