Daniel Chen on The Carpentries

Community Maintainer Lead: Recap, Update, and What's Next

Tue, 17 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Community Maintainer Lead

The Community Maintainer Lead is a volunteer position at The Carpentries with the main goal of supporting the lesson Maintainers. Angela Li was the first to have this role, where she worked on the Lesson Maintenance Handbook to help give new and existing maintainers more guidance on how to Maintain a lesson. When I took on the role after Angela, I wanted to help build the Maintainer community within and between individual lessons.

Welcome to our Newest Lesson Maintainers!

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that our most recent cohort of Lesson Maintainers have completed onboarding and are ready to support lessons across The Carpentries curricula. Eighteen new Maintainers participated in the three hour onboarding, using a completely updated curriculum with the following goals:

Orientation to The Carpentries goals and vision for lesson maintanence
Getting connected with other Maintainers and the overall Maintainer community
Developing skills for creating a positive environment for all contributors
Becoming familiar with the key components of the lesson template
Practicing core technical skills for lesson maintanence
Learning how and when to elevate issues to the Curriculum Advisory Committee

We are excited to welcome these new members to the Maintainer community and look forward to working with them, and continuing to work with our many committed continuing Maintainers, over the coming months.

Apply for the current round of Carpentries Maintainer Onboarding!

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries is preparing to onboard the next round of Maintainers. Currently we have 161 Maintainers serving across 54 core lessons. To keep the community healthy, we need to plan for people wanting to step down from their current positions and finding new people to step into the role.

Most of our official core lessons are currently in maintenance mode - meaning that the content is relatively stable. However, we are planning to move to a new lesson template and a new infrastructure stack for building the lessons. Over the next year, there will be a bit more work making sure all existing issues and PRs are dealt with as the lesson transition over to the new template and infrastructure stack.

Announcing our new Maintainer Community Lead

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone! I am excited to be joining The Carpentries as the next Maintainer Community Lead. The previous lead, Angela Li, has left me some large shoes to fill, in building and sustaining the Maintainer community, and I hope to build on what she has already created.

I joined Software Carpentry in 2014. Since then, I have maintained lessons and have taught numerous workshops, and just finished up my Carpentries Trainer Training. I am currently a PhD Student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in the eastern United States, looking at data science education in the biomedical sciences, where my work is heavily inspired by The Carpentries.

Online Workshop Logistics and Screen Layouts

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We just ran another online Software-Carpentry workshop with the University of Delaware. It was spread across 4 days over 2 weeks where each day covered a single topic. Thanks to all the instructors (Book Moyers, Daniel Chen, Sébastien Vigneau, Lorraine Ling) and helpers (Adam Faranda, Anders Kiledal, Heidi Van Every, Iman Bhattacharya, Jose Daniel Chazi Capelo, Madolyn MacDonald, Menolin Sharma, Preethy Nair, Riza Li, Sachin Gavali) to make the process go smoothly.

Being a Carpentries Maintainer and the Skills You Can Learn

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Back in 2016, I wrote a blog post about “What the Carpentries Mean To Me” and it traced how everything I know these days stems from my first SWC workshop in 2013. I still hold the same sentiment today.

In the past few years, one of the biggest skills I have become more fluent in is Git version control and collaboration. As a part of Carpentry instructor onboarding, we are asked to submit a Pull Request to an existing lesson. This serves as a litmus test to make sure things are working and you’ve gone through the collaboration process at least once (nobody is expecting a full understanding of Git). But, maintainers do need to be somewhat comfortable with Git.

What the Carpentries Mean To Me

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

October 26 marks my 3rd Github cakeday. It also marks my 3 year anniversary since my first Software Carpentry workshop as a learner. The icing on the cake (haha?) is that it’s also Open Access Week.

My first computer science course was in high school. I got though the class with a healthy amount of struggling, but I never thought I’d make it in computer science because some of my fellow classmates got though the class so effortlessly. My rationale at the time was: if this is what it takes to be good at computer science, I’d never make it. I graduated with a BA in psychology/behavioral neuroscience, and minors in biology and computer science.

Software Carpentry as a University Course

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The inaugural Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry Instructor and Helper Retreat is over! It was a long day, packed with tutorials, demos, and discussions. I (Daniel Chen) led a round table discussion with Tiffany Timbers and Jenny Bryan. You can watch the discussion and/or read the notes on etherpad.

Teaching Bimodal Workshops with a Large Range

Thu, 05 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Teaching a technical class always has its challenges. Teaching a technical workshop covering 3 or more topics over the span of 2 days is what makes us Software Carpentry instructors.

A common observation instructors have is the class demographics are bimodal/multimodal. There are students who attend the workshop with little to no experience, some have been using the tools we teach but want a more formal course, and finally, a student may know some of the tools, but use the workshop to learn Git or Python, for example. How do we as instructors deal with workshops where the range of student skills is extremely high?

This post is a case study of my most recent workshop and a call for help and discussion about we should do to make our workshops enjoyable for everyone. In many ways it is a complement to Peter and Cam's post Pulling In Those Left Behind.

Assessing Our Learners Part I

Tue, 23 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Three weeks ago, Jason Williams, Jeramia Ory, and Daniel Chen met at the New York Public Library to work out an initial survey to assess our learners. Greg Wilson and Katerena Kuksenok joined virtually to provide feedback. The goal was to take the comments from the various initial GitHub issues and create a draft of an assessment survey for everyone to provide input. Our first draft is up, so please provide feedback at {{site.github_url}}/assessment/issues/6.

Plan to Assess Our Learners

Thu, 21 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The assessment subcommittee seeks to assess the effectiveness of the activities of the Software Carpentry Foundation (SCF). It met a few weeks ago and drafted an action plan on how to move forward to create a series of assessments for our learners. This action plan will be the basis on how further assessment tools will be developed.

Cookie Cutter

Tue, 10 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I was first introduced to William Stafford Noble's paper "A Quick Guide to Organizing Computational Biology Projects" when Ivan Gonzalez and I taught Harvard last November. Noble describes how scientists in Computational Biology should set up their project folders so code, results, outputs, figures, and papers are all in easily understandable locations. He also writes about how one should run experiments (using driver scripts) to make workflows reproducible, readable, and understandable to others (and your future self).

Revamping the Instructor Survey

Sun, 02 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

In September, Greg Wilson wrote a blog post on "building better teachers" that was inspired in part by an issue brought up by John Blischak on reporting time spent on lessons. In order for us capture this information, we decided to revamp our post-workshop instructor survey.

Our First High School Workshop at Rockefeller University

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Camille Avestruz, Ivan Gonzalez, Timothy Cerino, and Daniel Chen all had the great opportunity to teach Software Carpentry's first zero-entry workshop to high school students. We were able to teach at Rockefeller thanks to the scientific foresight of Jeanne Garbarino and the rest of the Rockefeller team along with Arliss Collins, Greg Wilson and the SWC team. Lastly, thanks to Gabriel Perez-Giz for volunteering his time to help during the workshop.

The main goal of this workshop was to expose tomorrow's scientists to scientific computing as early as possible. For example, as genomics data for biology continues to grow, we are beginning to see a shift of biologists from the pipetter to the data scientist. Our goal was not to teach everyone all the skills needed so they can dive into retrieving, cleaning, and analyzing genomics or astronomy data the next day, but rather show them what is possible with computers, and expose them for the first time that the GUI may not always be the best tool for the job; and give some foundation of knowledge and concepts for perpetual self learning.

We followed the traditional SWC workshop materials, adapting the pace as needed. Bash, Python, and Git were covered.