Jon Pipitone on The Carpentries

Online Office Hours

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Starting this week we're trying something new: one-on-one online help sessions from instructors for anyone who has taken a bootcamp with us.

Bootcamps are great for introducing scientists to useful technology and new ideas about how to automate tasks and organise code. Our bootcamps try as much as possible to be relevant to scientists' daily workflow, but they're only two day long events; what happens when participants go back to "real life" and start to fit what they've learned into their daily work?

Pelican Guts: on content management for Software Carpentry

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This morning I spent some time talking over the content management problem for the Software Carpentry website with Greg. To recap: we'd like to make it easier for anyone to contribute and manage the website content (lecture pages, new bootcamps, events, etc). For example, there are plenty of bits of site building that could be automated so that contributing a new lecture or topic doesn'thave to involve wiring in links to a table of contents, forward and backward links to other lectures/topics, and so on.

Fighting Spam

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We recently experienced a spate of spam and fake user accounts on the course discussion forums. In this post I'll briefly explain what we're doing to stop that from happening again, and how the technology works.

The course forums are powered by bbPress, the forum software written by the WordPress folks. When I first installed it I left it with the default configuration settings and without doing anything in particular to lock it down from spammers. Bad idea. When I checked this morning we had over fifty fake user accounts, and two spam postings.

The Spring 2011 Course Begins

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The spring (or, if you'd rather, winter) run of the Software Carpentry course has started. We have 86 students currently registered. Here is the welcome email we sent out to the students late last week:

Hello,

Welcome to Software Carpentry. I'm Jon, one of the teaching assistants for this course, and I'm joined by TAs Orion Buske, Tommy Guy, Luis Zarrabeitia, and the course creator, Greg Wilson. In this email I'll tell you a bit about how the course is organised.

Repository URL Change

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We've been having problems hosting the course's Subversion repository at its current URL (http://software-carpentry.org/swc), and so we've moved it to:

http://svn.software-carpentry.org/swc

This URL points to the same repository as before. If you already have a working copy checked out you can switch it to use the new URL by running the following shell command in the top-level folder of your working copy:

Summary of student check-ins

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Over the last two weeks we've had short one-on-one conversations with the current students about how the course is going for them, and what they've enjoyed and haven't. We've heard from 30 students of the ~48 signed up in the course. For most students, their feedback was about the first three lectures (Version Control, Databases, Spreadsheets) and to some extent the Python lectures.

A New Site Design

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We've just made a few changes to the layout and look and feel of the Software Carpentry site.

The blog and new content is now accessible directly at http://software-carpentry.org/ Version 3.0 of the course material is still available at http://software-carpentry.org/3_0.
We've put all of the new content under the Topics menu, and shuffled a few of the other pages around to make things easier to find.
We've updated the WordPress theme to one that works better for embedded screencasts.

Let us know in the comments how you like the new configuration, and if you find any glitches.

Teaching databases by example

Fri, 28 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Over the last two weeks I've been spending most of my Software Carpentry time working on the database unit. They began as a fairly straight-forward translation of the Software Carpentry 3.0 lecture notes with only a few changes to the sequencing of the topics. The plan for the unit is fairly simple: each screencast introducing only one or two new topics, and builds on the previous screencasts with as few as possible forward references to later topics. The topics themselves are really just the different language features (SELECT, WHERE, JOIN, etc..) presented as tasks you might want to perform, and illustrated by working with toy data.

Day 8: Exercises (with a screencast)

Thu, 13 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Today I experimented with creating a few simple exercises for the material covered in the first screencast on databases. The very last exercise includes a screencast that walks through the solution, and a potential pitfall along the way. My apologies for the crappy audio and choppiness in a few places — I was using my laptop microphone, and I tried to edit out a few clicks and pops.

Day 7: Mini-screencasts

Wed, 12 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Yesterday Jason and Greg experimented with breaking apart a 10 minute screencast on database grouping and aggregation into even more bite-sized pieces. We have two flavours today: ~~point form notes with links to the screencasts~~, or ~~point form notes with screencasts embedded~~. [Links no longer active, latest screencast on database aggregation as of January 2012.]

Feedback on this format would be really helpful. Are these chunks too small? Do you prefer embedding over linking, or vice versa? Also, we'd welcome any comments on the material itself, of course.