Jannetta Steyn on The Carpentries

Subcommunity Spotlight: CarpentriesOffline

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Subcommunity Spotlight blog series aims to raise awareness of the many vibrant subcommunities within The Carpentries and highlight their activities. A subcommunity brings together a subset of the broader Carpentries community. It may be local (e.g., a university-based Carpentries Club), regional (e.g., The Carpentries in Africa), or special interest-driven (e.g., HPC Carpentry, Carpentries-es, CarpentriesOffline). The series aims to foster connections among members, whether they live in the same region, speak a common language, or share similar interests. To learn more or get involved in a subcommunity, join the subcommunity channel on Slack (#subcommunity) or reach out via email at community@carpentries.org. If you lead a subcommunity and would like to be featured in a future edition of this series, we’d love to hear from you!

Introducing the New Instructor Trainers Leadership Committee for 2025

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In March, members of the Instructor Trainer community were invited to vote in its fifth annual election for the Instructor Trainers Leadership Committee (ITLC). ITLC provides governance and development support to our growing subcommunity of Instructor Trainers, and makes decisions on behalf of that community that affect our Instructor Training program and related policies. However, this year an election was not required because the number of candidates (four) was fewer than the number of available seats (five). All four candidates were thus appointed by default, and to ensure all seats were filled, the committee appointed a fifth member.

Incentivising the Completion of Workshop Surveys: Tips for Instructors

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As all Carpentries Instructors probably know, it is very hard to get people to complete workshop surveys. It was time to find a solution, but what can we do to inspire folks to complete yet another boring survey. Despite all my promises to learners that we look at and consider all the comments and feedback we get, it has been a miracle every time we get more than 50 per cent of attendees to complete it. Giving people time, at the end of the lesson, to complete the survey helped a bit, but not much.

#Carpentries25 Testimonial Series: Jannetta Steyn

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In July 2023, The Carpentries turned 25 years! On July 24th we launched our #Carpentries25 anniversary celebrations which will continue for the remainder of the year with a series of monthly events and weekly activities highlighting the global and regional contributions and impact of The Carpentries community.

This #Carpentries25 Testimonial Series is one way we will celebrate this milestone. If you wish to contribute to this testimonial series please find the instructions in this announcement and reach out to us. Also, be sure to register to receive communications about upcoming monthly regional events.

CarpentriesOffline — CarpentryCon 2022 feedback and call for help

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally published on 12 December on Medium.

In July we published our first blog post to introduce CarpentriesOffline. This will be post number two, a report back of CarpentryCon 2022. We should probably get a name for this series. Any suggestions?

If you are not familiar with CarpentriesOffline — it is a project to create an environment for delivering Carpentries workshops offline using Raspberry Pi (RPi) computers. It could be any computer lying around that you don’t know what to do with, but for starters we are focussing on the RPi.

IoT for Novices in South Africa

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Originally posted on the Society of Research Software Engineering website, this blog post highlights an Introduction to the Internet of Things workshop hosted at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the buzzwords that researchers would like to include in their research and grant applications, but few actually understand what it is. So, when I was asked by Kim Martin whether I could run a workshop at Stellenbosch University in South Africa to introduce a group of curious researchers to this thing they are hearing so much about I immediately agreed – as usual before completely thinking it through. I am not an IoT expert but merely an enthusiast that likes playing around with microcontrollers, sensors and computery things such as Raspberry Pis. I am also a research software engineer and I immediately saw an opportunity to introduce research software engineering to researchers – not only because the workshop is being presented by an RSE but also to tell them how an RSE can benefit their research.

Running Software/Data and Library Carpentries workshops offline

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally posted on the Newcastle University Research Software Engineering Medium and is being published here with the permission of the author.

When the Internet “goes down”, my life comes to a standstill. So what happens when you are trying to deliver a Carpentries workshop and you have no Internet access? Usually, our workshop website with the schedule and all the links to the lessons materials are online. The collaborative part of the git lesson requires access to GitHub and of course, quite often, students have to download the data and the software they require for the workshop.

Lessons Learned - Data Carpentries Workshop for SADiLaR (August 31, 2020)

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

The call went out for instructors and helpers to cover the Data Carpentries Workshop from 31 August to 4 September 2020. Five instructors and two helpers were selected. We had two instructors from England (Jannetta and Varshita), one from France (Samuel), one from Kenya (Benson), one from Japan (Maggi), and two from South Africa (Marissa and Lactatia).

Preparation for the workshop

The workshop was organised by Angelique Trusler, the Regional Consultant for Southern Africa. Attendees were sent instructions in an email on how to download and install the data and software required. A couple of weeks before the workshop the instructors and helpers were put into contact with one another via email to decide who would do what during the workshop. We used a shared online spreadsheet to indicate which parts we would like to teach and who would be able to act as helpers on what days.

Running Newcastle University's First Online Software Carpentries Workshop

Thu, 24 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

How it all started

On April 1, 2020, Newcastle University’s Research Software Engineering (RSE) team became one year old. We are a very new team, but have great plans for the future. One is to badge as many as possible of our team as Carpentries Instructors so that we can run Carpentries workshops at the university for research staff and students.

I managed to attend an online instructor training workshop towards the end of March 2020 just as lockdown started. Inspired and enthused at how well the instructors’ workshop worked online I quickly completed the checkout process and then started exploring opportunities for an excuse to run a workshop. Being the first to complete the instructor training, hopefully, a few more of my colleagues will follow in September 2020.