François Michonneau on The Carpentries

Celebrating The Carpentries Workbench

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In May 2023, a significant milestone was reached as The Carpentries transitioned all 43 of its official lessons to a new lesson infrastructure, The Carpentries Workbench. This project, led by Zhian Kamvar our Lesson Infrastructure Developer, was a three-year coordinated effort requiring input and contributions from many members of our community. We asked six of them to provide their reflections on the project, its impact, and Zhian’s leadership.

Jennifer Stubbs, Assistant Professor, Bradley University

Community Roles: Community Session Host, Instructor, Maintainer

Honoring François Michonneau - Senior Director of Technology

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

François is exceptionally gifted and a phenomenal leader. On his last day, we share some of his wonderful accomplishments over the past 4+ years.

François joined The Carpentries in 2018 as Curriculum Development Lead in an effort to scale our collaboratively developed curriculum, though he was no stranger to the community. François has been a Data and Software Carpentry community member since 2014, serving in multiple roles including Maintainer, Instructor, and Trainer. As Curriculum Development Lead, he co-organised Data Carpentry’s first Bug BBQ, developed GitHub labels for The Carpentries lessons, and was instrumental in publishing Data Carpentry’s Social Sciences lessons. He has provided strategic oversight for The Carpentries lesson infrastructure, advising on the technical and community engagement aspects of this work. His expertise has proven invaluable in preparing several grant applications and engaging with potential partners. For example, François co-led the Carpentries Lab grant proposal development and implementation funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). Additionally, he was co-PI on our CZI grant to advance The Carpentries equity, inclusion, and accessibility goals, helping to secure $399,300 over 24 months.

Update to our Privacy Policy

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce the release our new Privacy Policy. This new version follows a more standard structure and spells out your rights and how to exercise them under European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Customer Privacy Act (CCPA). It also includes the legal basis we use to process your personal information.

One thing that has not changed is our commitment to your privacy. We collect as little data as possible, we do not (and never will) sell your data, and we provide you with access to all the data we store about you directly from your AMY profile.

Hacktoberfest 2021 - Glosario Contribution Drive

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Last year, members of The Carpentries community came together during Hacktoberfest to contribute to Glosario, an open source, multilingual glossary of data science terms. Hacktoberfest is a “month-long celebration of open source” run by DigitalOcean, during which participants can register their contributions to open source projects on GitHub and qualify to have a tree planted in your name.

We need you!

This month, as part of Hacktoberfest, we are encouraging all members of our community to contribute to the expansion and internationalisation of Glosario. So far, the glossary includes definitions in 17 languages and has been designed to include definitions in any language. We would love to see our international community come together to provide definitions and translations in these and other languages, to increase the value of this resource for everyone, regardless of the language(s) they use.

Recruiting new members to the Code of Conduct Committee

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries are committed to providing a welcoming and supportive environment for all people, and our [Code of Conduct]({{ site.code_of_conduct_url }}) (CoC) is the framework for this commitment. The Code of Conduct Committee (CoCC) is responsible for managing the Code of Conduct, handling reports of conduct violations, and advocating for the CoC in the community.

The Carpentries Code of Conduct Committee is currently recruiting new members. We seek 3-4 community members who are passionate about ensuring that The Carpentries is a welcoming space, who have time to dedicate to the committee, and who bring diversity to the committee. In addition, it is beneficial, but not necessary, to have previous experience with this kind of work.

Introducing our new Workshop Administrator Danielle Sieh

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We are delighted to announce that Danielle Sieh has accepted the job of Workshop Administrator with The Carpentries. Danielle is joining our team of workshop coordinators who manage workshop logistics, communicate with hosts and instructors, and respond to general workshop inquiries.

You will be seeing emails from her soon, and you can contact Danielle at workshops@carpentries.org. Welcome Danielle!

A message from Danielle

I am truly delighted to be joining The Carpentries team in the role of Workshop Administrator. I am based in Columbus, Ohio (USA) and I am relatively new to The Carpentries organisation and mission. However, after a lot of research and a whole lot of reading, I became quite enamored with The Carpentries and everything the organisation embodies. Having a background largely involved in education and community relations, I was excited to see the emphasis on evidence-based teaching, inclusivity and diversity, and a strong focus on getting information across to the learner in a way that works for them. I am thrilled to be working for such an incredible organisation and can’t wait to see what amazing opportunities this role brings.

Thank you for contributing to Glosario!

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In October we asked you to contribute to Glosario, the online, multilingual glossary of data science terms, as part of Hacktoberfest. The Carpentries community is international and, as well as contributing definitions of new terms in the languages already represented in the glossary, we wanted to encourage the introduction of new and translated definitions into more languages.

We know that the Carpentries community is amazing and we are delighted to say that you came through for us again! At the end of September, Glosario contained 528 definitions for 467 terms in four languages. By the time all contributions made during Hacktoberfest had been merged, the glossary contained 716 definitions for 521 terms, in eight languages! In addition to all these new definitions, translations, and languages, Glosario had also gained four new editors - Janetta Steyn and Angelique Trusler for Afrikaans, Beatriz Milz for Portuguese, and Batool Almarzouq for Arabic - and twelve new contributors (13 contributors before Hacktoberfest; 25 after).

Welcome Rabea Müller, Regional Coordinator for the DACH Region

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Regional Coordinators are essential to the daily operations of Carpentries workshops. With workshops being offered globally it is important for us to have Regional Coordinators locally placed to help organise workshops. The Carpentries is excited to announce Rabea Müller has joined our team of Regional Coordinators. Rabea is located in Cologne, Germany and will be managing workshops in the DACH region, which consists of Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

In addition to being a Regional Coordinator, Rabea is responsible for the development of a Data Science and Data Librarianship at our institution ZB MED. She is a Carpentries Instructor and Lesson Maintainer and has taught five workshops and counting.

We are Hiring Three New Team Members. Join Our Team.

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries is hiring!

The Carpentries is searching for two new full-time team members, and one temporary employee or contractor to join our global, mission-driven organisation. These new roles will work with and serve our volunteer community - comprising approximately 70,000 learners, 2,500 instructors, 100 Trainers, and 85 partner organisations from research institutions around the world. See below for descriptions and links to apply.

Director of Partnerships / Deputy Director of Partnerships

We are hiring a Director or Deputy Director of Partnerships to provide planning, vision, and implementation of the partnership program and represent the needs of partner organisations in planning and strategic development. Individuals with work authorisation in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, or the United States should apply.

Announcing the new Help Wanted page

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A new Help Wanted page was recently added to The Carpentries website, providing a list of issues in need of some help, from Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, Software Carpentry, The Carpentries, and Carpentries Incubator GitHub repositories. We hope this will serve as a single point of reference for trainee instructors completing the checkout process, and anyone else looking for a way to make an impact by contributing to our materials.

The page provides an accessible overview of all open issues that maintainers have identified as needing help, across many of our official and community-developed lesson repositories. The listing also includes issues from the repositories of other Carpentries resources, such as Glosario, and infrastructure such as the organisational websites and lesson template.

Design principles for the next iteration of The Carpentries lesson template

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post introduces twelve design principles that will guide the development of the next version of The Carpentries lesson template. First, we provide some background and definitions. If you are more interested in the principles themselves, you can skip forward to the Design Principles section.

Background

In The Carpentries’ history (including Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Software Carpentry), we have learned a lot about lesson templates. We have had two main versions of the template that relied on GitHub Pages. As the community grows, we are adding more lessons through [our community-developed lessons]({{ site.url }}/community-lessons/) (The Carpentries Incubator and The Carpentries Lab) every week; and we are starting to see the limitations of our current workflow. Given changes in the tools and infrastructure, we are envisioning the next iteration of the lesson template.

Announcing Glosario

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

glosario is an open source glossary of terms used in data science that is available online and also as a library in both R and Python. Authors can add glossary keys to a lesson’s metadata to indicate what the lesson teaches, what learners ought to know before they start, and where they can go to find that knowledge. Authors can also use the library’s functions to insert consistent hyperlinks for terms in their lessons in any of several (human) languages, and anyone who has installed the library can use it interactively to look things up while they are programming.

Looking Back and Looking Forward: Scaling Collaborative Curriculum Development

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In February 2018, Data Carpentry was awarded funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support creation of sustainable infrastructure and scalable processes for curriculum development and maintenance. In May 2020, our funding for this initial scaling effort wrapped up. Here we report on lessons learned, work accomplished through this funding, and where our curriculum development and maintenance sustainability efforts are headed in the next few years.

Our primary deliverables for this grant were:

Introducing our New Lesson Infrastructure Technology Developer

Wed, 18 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I am super excited to join The Carpentries as the Lesson Infrastructure Technology Developer. Throughout my career, I have worked towards making complicated analytical tasks just a bit easier for scientists through both software and training. The chance to work with the wonderful people at The Carpentries on improving the lesson infrastructure is no short of a dream job!

I have just finished a stint at Imperial College London where I worked with both The R Epidemics Consortium (RECON) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) International to develop tools, templates, and training materials for field epidemiologists to perform reproducible analyses in R. I was previously a plant pathologist where I developed tools for population genetic analysis of clonal organisms as well as tutorials and workshops introducing plant pathologists to R, reproducible research, and data management.

Testing CodiMD

Wed, 26 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Collaborative note-taking is an essential part of what makes our workshops a success. Workshop participants enjoy being able to see the exact syntax of a command that was shared by an instructor, share tips, or ask questions. Collaborative note-taking is also a powerful approach for the many online meetings that take place in our community. Up until now, we have been using Etherpad as the solution to do this collaborative note-taking.

Gratitude from the Infrastructure Team

Wed, 11 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The infrastructure The Carpentries Team manages is mostly invisible to its users, and yet it provides critical services to our community members.

To name a few, we run our own Etherpad instance, we have scripts that ensures that our websites display up-to-date information about our [workshops]({% link pages/upcoming_workshops.html %}) and our [community members]({% link pages/instructors.html %}), and we [generate reports]({% link _posts/2019/10/2019-10-21-transition-to-typeform.md %}) based on the results of the pre- and post-workshop surveys.

New Etherpad server

Sun, 01 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Our Etherpad instance is a critical part of our infrastructure. Everyday, hundreds of community members use it to take notes during workshops, instructor trainings, and community calls.

On November 30th, we upgraded the server that runs our Etherpad instance to accommodate the growth of our community. In the process, we have also upgraded to the latest version of Etherpad and made a few visible changes.

You will notice that:

we are using a new look that improves the lisibility of the content of the pads;
it is now possible to have different headings and styles in your pads;
the date at which a message has been posted in the chat window is now visible.

We hope these updates to our Etherpad instance will make your work and interactions with the Carpentries community better.

A Better Experience for Workshop Surveys

Mon, 21 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Assessment is a key element of our operations. Today, we are excited to announce that we are revamping the tools behind our pre- and post-workshop surveys to provide a better experience to our learners and to our instructors. This change also greatly reduces the time needed for the workshop administration team to generate the links they share with instructors to access the results. The changes outlined here only affect our regular workshops, but in early 2020, they will also affect Instructor Training events.

22 Months in the Making: New Genomics Curriculum Release

Mon, 08 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

All of The Carpentries lessons focus on teaching core skills, rather than particular tools. But, as Greg Wilson says, “We have to use something” to teach those skills. Because we do use particular tools in our teaching, we frequently need to balance the need for lesson stability against the need to stay up to date with new technology.

In November 2017, Data Carpentry released a curriculum for working with genomic sequencing data. Work on this curriculum had started all the way back in 2014, and at the end of 2017 had reached a stable state where the lessons were ready to be taught by people outside of the original development group. This workshop teaches genomics researchers how to manage their data, access data from popular sequencing databases, automate their analysis pipelines by writing custom Bash scripts, and compute in the cloud. It’s targeted at complete novices, with no previous programming experience, and is designed to help research teams level-up their computational skills and get more done in less time.

Announcing the June 2019 lesson release!

Tue, 02 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As a community committed to iterative improvement, our lessons are never done. Every day, Maintainers receive feedback and contributions to help our lessons run more smoothly, stay up to date with technology changes, and be accessible to more audiences. Despite (or maybe because of!) this constant improvement, it’s important to take the time to celebrate our progress and to give credit to the hundreds of people who make our lessons the wonderful resource they are for the tens of thousands of learners who attend our workshops and use our materials online.

36 lessons will be published, which ones will you contribute to?

Wed, 15 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries lessons continuously change and improve through individual contributions from Instructors, workshop helpers, learners, and other users of the lessons. These contributions are guided by our lesson Maintainers, who also participate in and often lead large-scale updates to their lessons. To provide tangible credit for the work done by Maintainers and other contributors, we periodically publish our lessons on Zenodo, which provides a citable work product (DOI) that contributors can put on their CV or resume. Since our last coordinated lesson release in August 2017, many Library Carpentry lessons have become stable and ready for their first release. Several Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry lessons have also had major updates during this time period and are ready to release a new version.

Genomics Workshop Pilot and BugBBQ at University of Arizona

Wed, 15 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

This February, a small group of committed community members, led by Taylor Reiter at the University of California, Davis, completed a major update to the Data Carpentry Genomics curriculum. A huge thank you to everyone who contributed! This update included significant changes to both the data set and the software used for the lessons, modernizing the workshop and keeping it relevant to researchers working in the genomics field. The new version of this curriculum is already live and will be officially published in the upcoming lesson release in June.

Announcing The Carpentries Curriculum Development Handbook

Wed, 03 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Note (2024-12-09): The Curriculum Development Handbook has been retired. Its content has been incorporated into the new Lesson Developer Handbook, the curriculum for Collaborative Lesson Development Training and other sections of the Community Handbook.

Note (2020-02-03): The Curriculum Development Handbook is contiually being developed, so the links below may change. The main page of the Curriculum Development Handbook can be found at https://cdh.carpentries.org/

A key value of community is the horizontal transmission of culture - sharing mistakes we’ve made and lessons we’ve learned so that things are easier for the next person. In our Instructor Training program, we prepare new instructors to teach existing content using evidence-based teaching methods. The spirit of Carpentries lessons, however, doesn’t lie in reproducing the script faithfully and teaching the content “as is”. Every time our lessons are taught, they’re a little bit different, as Instructors try things out, learn, and (hopefully) contribute back to the lessons so that others can benefit from their experiences. Because of the innovation of our Instructors, and the value our community places on iteration and collaborativity, The Carpentries’ lessons get stronger every time they are taught.

Curriculum Development Goals for the Rest of 2018

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As we are entering the last quarter of 2018, and following up on our Curriculum Development Vision post, we want to outline plans for the rest of the year and the beginning of 2019. We plan to post regular updates on curriculum development plans as updates and calls for participation in particular activities or teaching updated materials. For each set of curriculum there are Curriculum Advisory Committees and there is an overall Lesson Infrastructure Committee. If you are interested in being involved in lesson activities, please check out the issues on any of the lessons, send an email to team@carpentries.org, or join one of the lesson-specific email lists for more information or questions.

Re-evaluating the Anonymity of Our Workshop Survey Data

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Recently we discovered some potential issues with our survey data, and we are re-evaluating how we store, share, and analyse answers from our pre- and post-workshop surveys. While data from these surveys is anonymised, we realised that there are situations where demographic data can be used to identify a participant’s individual responses. We have taken steps to update our workflow and ensure a stronger anonymisation of the workshop survey responses. Below, we document the issues and how we are changing our processes moving forward.

Vision and Plans for Curriculum Development with The Carpentries

Tue, 31 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries has seen a growing interest in individuals, research groups, and institutions wanting to develop lessons for their own domain of research. We are very excited by the potential brought by this growth. Diversifying our lesson offerings means we can extend our reach to new communities, and further disseminate our practices of teaching and collaborative lesson development. We also want to ensure that the lessons we offer remain as the high quality level as our members, Instructors, and learners expect. Here, we outline our vision and plans to support this growth in curricula while sustaining existing lessons and our organisation. Between now and early 2019, we will be focusing on establishing the infrastructure needed to support lesson development and scaling up our lesson offerings. Starting in January 2019, we’ll have new pathways to onboard lessons.

Report on the Next Steps in R workshop at CarpentryCon 2018

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A three-hour workshop called “Next Steps in R” was offered on Day 3 (June 1st, 2018) of CarpentryCon 2018, and approximately 14 people attended. The intended audience were those who had previous experience using R, ideally dabbling with components of the tidyverse like {dplyr} or {ggplot2}, and who wanted to take their skills to the next level. Specifically, the goal of this workshop was not only for learners to acquire new data manipulation skills, but also to practice using these skills while considering the thought processes behind developing workflow pipelines. Essentially, if you are dealing with a single or multiple data sets, and want to get from point A to point B, what tools are available?, and what do you need to think about when using them?

Report: Lesson Infrastructure Breakout at CarpentryCon

Thu, 14 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

One of the breakout sessions at CarpentryCon focussed on lesson infrastructure: the template we use for our lessons and how this template and the platform that we use to deliver this material (GitHub Pages & Jekyll) could be improved/better utilised. The session was led by François Michonneau, our Curriculum Development Lead, with notes taken by Toby Hodges. This blogpost is a summary of the discussion in that session. You can see the original notes on this etherpad.

A summary of the tweets generated at CarpentryCon 2018, Dublin

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

To complete the CarpentryCon report, I analysed the tweets with the “#CarpentryCon2018” hashtag or that mentioned “@CarpentryCon” using the rtweet R package by Michael W. Kearney. The source code used is available from GitHub and is based on the analyses of tweets generated during the Evolution conference in 2015 and 2017. This analysis would not also be possible without the tidytext and the tidyverse packages.

The figures seem to reflect the feeling participants expressed during the conference. The Carpentries is about the great people making up our community and this is reflected in the word cloud, and the most commonly associated words. The sentiment analysis shows very little use of words associated with negativity (and the ones used seem to be from people who could not attend the event), but instead highlight the positive experience of the participants.

Social Sciences Lessons Published!

Thu, 17 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We are excited to announce the initial release of a Data Carpentry Social Sciences Curriculum. This is the first Data Carpentry Curriculum to be released targeted towards researchers outside of the life sciences and provides an opportunity to reach out to new communities.

Peter Smyth has assembled the initial content for these lessons with the guidance of Rachel Gibson, Professor of Political Science at the Cathie Marsh Institute of Social Research, University of Manchester, UK. It was polished during the April 2018 Bug BBQ, and the finishing was done by the lesson Maintainers in coordination with Carpentries staff.

April 2018 Bug BBQ Summary

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

On 12-13 April, The Carpentries hosted our first joint Bug BBQ. The main objective of this event was to get the lessons for the Geospatial and Social Sciences Data Carpentry curricula ready for release. We also invited contributions to all Software and Data Carpentry lessons during this time. A Bug BBQ is a global, distributed event, where the community gathers to work collaboratively on our lessons. The combination of having dedicated time to look at the lessons and many fresh sets of eyes to examine their contents makes these events excellent for moving new lessons forward. For older lessons, it is a good opportunity to go through any old issues and pull requests, especially ones that require some extra thinking, or that propose significant changes to the lesson.

Developing GitHub labels for The Carpentries lessons

Thu, 05 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

In November and December of 2017, we conducted a series of interviews with lesson Maintainers. You can read the summary and see a link to the full report on this blog post. A major theme that emerged from the interviews was that the Maintainers’ jobs were sometimes difficult because it was not always clear what was expected from them or how much authority they have on deciding what can be changed in the content of the lessons. To begin to address these issues, we developed an onboarding for new Maintainers to clarify the role and responsibilities of Maintainers. We also created Curriculum Advisory Committees for the different curricula, to offer high-level guidance on lesson structure and technology choices.

How to be involved in the Bug BBQ?

Wed, 04 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Remind me…

When is the Bug BBQ?

It starts on April 12th, 9am Eastern (US) and ends on April 13th, 5pm Pacific (US) (click on the links to see these dates and times for your timezone).

What is the Bug BBQ? Why are we doing one?

You can read more about this in the announcement post.

What is the website with all the info?

https://carpentries.github.io/2018-04-bug-bbq/

I want to contribute to the lessons during the Bug BBQ!

We created a guide that outlines how to contribute to the Bug BBQ. There are many ways to get involved, the issues to address are as varied as the skills they require, and the time it takes to fix them.

How to be involved in the Bug BBQ?

Tue, 03 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Remind me…

When is the Bug BBQ?

It starts on April 12th, 9am Eastern (US) and ends on April 13th, 5pm Pacific (US) (click on the links to see these dates and times for your timezone).

What is the Bug BBQ? Why are we doing one?

You can read more about this in the announcement post.

What is the website with all the info?

https://carpentries.github.io/2018-04-bug-bbq/

Announcing the first joint Carpentries Bug BBQ

Thu, 08 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The Bug BBQ is a Carpentry-wide event to improve all our lessons – both existing Software and Data Carpentry lessons, and new releases. We welcome contributions from the Community on all of our lessons. If you want to contribute, but you are not sure where to start, head over to the Bug BBQ website where we will highlight how to get involved.

The Carpentries are preparing to publish the Social Sciences and the Geospatial Data Carpentry curricula on Zenodo. The Social Science Lessons will be published in April, and the Geospatial Lessons in June. This will be the first publication for these lessons. We regularly publish our lessons (SWC, DC) to provide stable identifiers for polished versions of the lessons. This enables referenced discussions of the lesson materials and gives contributors a verifiable product to cite on their CVs or resumes.

Announcing the first joint Carpentries Bug BBQ

Wed, 07 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

A Year to Build a Software and Data Carpentry Community at the University of Florida - The Impact of a Local Instructor Training Workshop on Building Computing Capacity

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

This January was the one year anniversary of our effort to bring regular Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry workshops to the University of Florida. These workshops are aimed at helping students, staff, and faculty gain the computing skills they need to be successful in our data-driven world. The Carpentries are international organizations that provide materials, instructor certification, and organization of multi-day workshops on basic software development and data analysis tools. In January 2016 a Software Carpentry instructor training workshop held at the University of Florida Informatics Institute provided the start of our efforts. Since then, instructors trained here as well as experienced instructors already in the UF community have held four workshops, reaching 98 participants, including 70 students, 14 staff and 11 faculty. The participants received training in programming languages like R and Python, version control with Git and GitHub, SQL database queries, OpenRefine, and Excel spreadsheets.

Ecology Issue Bonanza!!!

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We’re excited to announce our first lesson release! Data Carpentry is preparing to publish our Ecology workshop materials on Zenodo this Spring. Software Carpentry regularly publishes their lessons to provide stable identifiers for polished versions of the lessons. This enables referenced discussions of the lesson materials and gives contributors a verifiable product to cite on their CVs or resumes.

This lesson release will include the following repos:

A Year to Build a Software and Data Carpentry Community at the University of Florida - The Impact of a Local Instructor Training Workshop on Building Computing Capacity

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The R ecology lessons

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Data Carpentry lessons are aimed at learners who have never programmed before. Learning something new, especially coding, can feel intimidating. Yet learners attending our workshops are motivated as they realize it is a skill they will eventually need to master to be able to manage and make sense of the data they are generating in their research. When learning a programming language, you eventually need to master two things: the syntax of the language (e.g., where the parentheses and the commas go), and the intricacies of the language that will make you write less code and faster code (e.g., taking advantage of the vectorized operations). The first can be learned relatively quickly, the second takes years of practice. One of the advantages of learning the basics of programming during a workshop is that we can teach learners good practices from the start, rather than having to go through the painful experiences that typically accompany self-learning experiences.

Reproducible Research using Jupyter Notebooks: Curriculum Development Hackathon

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Goal: Develop the content of a two-day Data Carpentry workshop teaching how to conduct research reproducibly using the Jupyter notebook
Location: Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), Berkeley, CA
Dates and times: January 9 - 11, 2017; 9 am - 5 pm each day
To apply: https://goo.gl/aPO71f; deadline December 5, 2016. Successful applicants will be notified by December 12.

Synopsis

Making science more reproducible has enormous potential to accelerate research advances, including for practicing individuals. Despite this, the tools and approaches that are already available are rarely taught. To address this, we are organizing a 3-day hands-on hackathon aimed at developing, and later teaching, a short-course curriculum on using Jupyter notebooks for reproducible research practices. The event will be held January 9 - 11, 2016, in Berkeley, CA, at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS). We aim to assemble a diverse and interdisciplinary group of participants, and invite those interested to apply by December 5, 2016, at https://goo.gl/aPO71f.

Using RMarkdown with the new lesson template

Fri, 08 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Our lesson template is getting a face-lift. Actually, it is a lot more than that: all the internal mechanics are also affected.

What’s new with the template?

The lesson maintainers have developed a new template that comes with features that have been repeatedly requested such as an easy way to navigate among episodes within a lesson: there are now “previous” and “next” arrows in each episode.