Raniere Silva on The Carpentries

Teaching Software Carpentry at the University of Botswana

Thu, 10 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

On 16-19 September, I taught a Software Carpentry workshop at the University of Botwsana.

The workshop was hosted by the Southern Africa Innovation Support (SAIS) Universities-Industry-Government (UIG) Co-creation Platform and had more than 30 learners.

Because Professor Tshiamo Motshegwa was travelling during the workshop, Badisa Mosesane was in charge of talk about The Carpentries and introduce me.

Badisa Mosesane explaining about The Carpentries.

During the workshop, I taught navigating files and directories with Bash, working With files and directories with Bash, for-loop with Bash, Git, GitHub, for-loop with Python, if-clause with Python, Python functions, Python scripts, debugging Python code, and Make.

Invitation to The Carpentries Sponsorship Programme Task Force

Mon, 22 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In May, we shared our 2018 Finances with you. The Executive Council determined that one way to increase our capacity by bringing more income is via a Sponsorship Programme.. We are looking for four members of our community with previous experience regarding sponsorship to help develop The Carpentries 2020 Sponsorship Programme. To volunteer, fill the Google Form before 9 August 2019 Anywhere on Earth.

As an organisation with strong values, we want to be intentional about organisations we take in as sponsors, so in creating a Sponsorship Programme for The Carpentries, we would like to establish a process and way of evaluating potential sponsors. Members of this Task Force will engage in two virtual meetings (one hour long each) in September 2019 to discuss The Carpentries Sponsorship Programme.

Financial Updates

Tue, 28 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We have completed our first year as a joint project, The Carpentries, and now have more concrete information we can use to evaluate and plan for our long-term sustainability. Financial sustainability is a primary consideration in keeping our programs going, as financial resources allow us to pay for people and infrastructure, support our community and Member Organisations, teach workshops, connect with each other and develop local capacity for training, update resources, and develop new programs. You can see more details about our projects and personnel time in this blog post.

2018 Community Service Award Winners

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries Executive Council is happy to announce that Tim Dennis, Margareth Gfrerer and Toby Hodges received the 2018 Community Service Award and Fotis Psomopoulos and Malvika Sharan the special CarpentryCon Community Award. Thank you for contributions to the The Carpentries community!

Community Service Award

The Community Service Award was created to recognise some of the exceptional work by volunteers in our community. These awards are nominated by the community and selected by the Executive Council. “Exceptional work” can mean many things, for example, attending community calls when you have poor internet connection, changing your calendar to attend committee meetings or finding the time to not only teach but help support and coordinate workshops or Instructor training events. Some of this work is more visible in our community and others is more ‘behind the scenes’. All have made exceptional contributions, not just to activities, but to supporting and developing others in the community. The Executive Council is pleased to award the 2018 Community Service Award to Tim Dennis, Margareth Gfrerer and Toby Hodges for their tremendous work that together represents what The Carpentry community is and exemplifies our spirit of ‘further together’.

Nominate a member to Community Service Award before 19 November

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries is receiving nominations for 2018 Community Service Award until Monday, 19 November, 2018 Anywhere on Earth Time. To nominate a member of the community, fill in “The Carpentries Community Service Award 2018 Nomination” (Google) Form.

Who can be nominated?

Any individual who has contributed to The Carpentries and member projects, e.g. Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry and Library Carpentry, in any form who is neither a member of the Executive Council nor a member of staff.

Nominate a Member You’ve Noticed Working Extra Hard in 2018

Thu, 04 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In 2016, Software Carpentry gave Christina Koch, Adrianna Pinska and Jon Pipitone the Community Service Award for their valuable contributions to the project. In 2017, Anelda van der Walt received the award. This year, with the merger of Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry to create the umbrella project known as The Carpentries, the Executive Council decided to continue with the recognition of extra hard work by some volunteers and will choose and announce 2018 award winners in December.

CarpentryCon Experienced by Latin American Attendees

Wed, 18 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by the “CarpentryCon Experienced by the African Carpentry Task Force” blog post, we decided to copycat our friends from the other side of the Atlantic and share our experience.

Paula Andrea Martinez

CarpentryCon was on my plans to attend since last year. Yes, I was super eager to meet the online community in person. Interacting with people online and then to see familiar faces and add a hug to each of the greetings was very gratifying. I’ve been working with the Carpentry community for three years and a bit more, and since last year, having many online meetings, multiple email and issue threads. All of you were part of my days, also I’ve missed not seeing some of you. For me, it was a sharing kind of event, people are so passionate and interested in taking this forwards so it was always very nice to hear the stories behind what has been achieved. It also gladly surprised me to have heard so many “thank you” phrases flowing one way or the other. Thanks for every person who made the event possible and looking forward to keep on the train of the communities. A personal highlight, when I presented the work of The Carpentries in Latin America in a short talk, I felt the need to continue with this, because many people will benefit of this amazing community.

Executive Council 1st 2018 Tertile Report

Fri, 18 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

May 2018 is almost over and The Carpentries Executive Council wants to provide a brief report of their activities during the first four months of 2018. We are slowly getting to know each other, our role as the Executive Council and what it means that we now are a single organisation.

Executive Council members are listed on the Governance page where you can also find links to the minutes of the Executive Council monthly meetings.

Rethinking the Lesson Pipeline

Tue, 15 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

If you had a look at CarpentryCon’s program, you might know that I will be facilitating two sessions: “Contributing on GitHub” on Wednesday, 30 May and “Bring and Build Your Own Lesson ‘Carpentries-style’” on Friday, 1 June. During the process to organise both sessions, I have ben thinking a lot of what we could improve in the way that we write our lessons. One of the things that I know that annoys many of the maintainers is the fact that they need to copy and paste the output of each command. RStudio has been work in a new project called reticulate that “enables easy interoperabilty between Python and R chunks” and in this process they have made it much easier to use Python from R Markdown.

Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee 2018 February meeting

Wed, 28 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On 14 February 2018 at 18:00 UTC+0, the Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee had their 2018 February meeting. This post will cover the topics discussed and their resolutions.

Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry merge

Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry have merged. Their Executive Council was elected, they have a new fiscal sponsor and a new logo. Also, they have hired Dr. François Michonneau to lead curriculum development efforts.

Workshop Template Enhancement Proposal

Tue, 16 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Over the last couple of years, many emails and issues on GitHub requested moving the setup instructions in the Workshop Template to a separate page for valid reasons. To provide some reference, see swcarpentry/DEPRECATED-bc#415, swcarpentry/DEPRECATED-bc#729, swcarpentry/workshop-template#194 and swcarpentry/workshop-template#408.

What did we discover during those years and trials?

Finding the balance to accommodate long time and advanced instructors, novice or intermediate instructors and learners is as hard as carrying a watermelon with a tea spoon. So why are we having this discussion again?

Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee 2017 November meeting

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On 16 November 2017 at 15:00 UTC+0, the Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee had their 2017 November meeting. This post will cover the topics discussed and their resolutions.

Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry merger

With the merger in 2018, some Git repositories will be owned by a new GitHub organization. The Instructor Training course material has already been moved, you can now find it at http://carpentries.github.io/instructor-training/. Date for the migration will be announced in 2018. Instructions for migrating the repository can be find here.

Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee 2017 November meeting

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

On 16 November 2017 at 15:00 UTC+0, the Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee had their 2017 November meeting. This post will cover the topics discussed and their resolutions.

Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry merger

Raniere Silva: Nomination for 2018 Steering Committee

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Who am I?

My name is Raniere Silva. I’m a Brazilian who currently lives in Manchester, UK, where I work for the Software Sustainability Institute as a Community Officer and help run the Institute’s Fellowship Programme. The programme supports, among other activities, Carpentry workshops and this incredible community in the UK and beyond.

Previous Involvement

I discovered Software Carpentry in 2013 after reading this blog post, being redirected to it by this announcement. Months later, I joined the 6th round of instructor training along side Leszek Tarkowski, Michael Crusoe, Christina Koch, Mark Laufersweiler, Jonah Duckles and many other fabulous instructors that I would only meet in person years later.

Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee 2017 September meeting

Tue, 12 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On 5 September 2017 at 14:00UTC+0, the Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee had their 2017 September meeting. This post will cover the topics discussed and their resolutions.

Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry merge

With the upcoming merge, this subcommittee needs to start thinking about streamlining the thinking process and disconnect from the organisations that maintain the lessons. The responsibilities for this subcommittee will stay unchanged:

Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee 2017 September meeting

Tue, 12 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

On 5 September 2017 at 14:00UTC+0, the Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee had their 2017 September meeting. This post will cover the topics discussed and their resolutions.

Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry merge

How to print our lessons?

Mon, 08 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

From the time that I joined Software Carpentry, I remember two feature requests that often showed up on our list of issues. The first one was links to help navigate the lessons and the second one was a way to print the lessons. Adding these two features was challenging because the limited information that is available as metadata by Jekyll (or Pandoc, which we used for a while). In addition, we want to have a “real” solution, instead of a workaround that is going to stop work in a few months. Although as software developers we knew that at every release of Jekyll, or any other library, that we are using exist a chance that our pipeline will break.

Plans for Windows Installer

Thu, 04 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

In March, we had two email threads on our discuss mailing list related to nano on Windows machines The first thread was about “nano not found”, a bug on our installer that we never managed to trace. The second thread was about some “misbehaviour” of nano on Windows, and the suggestion to use Atom as the default text editor. The suggestion to use Atom started a long discussion where instructors described their reasons to use nano and why Atom is inadequate which lead us to start investigating ways to install nano properly on Windows. On May 3rd, Kate Hertweck, Maneesha Sane, Naupaka Zimmerman, Rémi Emonet and I met online to draft a plan—taking into consideration all of the feedback that was provided in the past month—to solve the problem with nano on Windows.

Announcing for Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee

Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

One of the issues that we have with the styles, lesson-example, and workshop-template repositories is that some issues or pull request just sit around for a long time because of the lack of ownership of those repositories. Going on with the Proposal for Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee, that will try to solve that issue, we would like to announce that Subcommittee calendar for 2017.

Software Carpentry on TalkPython

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On January 3rd, 2017 TalkPython published a podcast interview with our Executive Director, Jonah Duckles, that was recorded on December 6th, 2016. If you have friends who are interested to know about Software Carpentry and are fan of listen podcast (or not) the record is a great way for them to discovery what we are and how we operate.

In the past, our staffs were interviewed in other podcasts by Open Science Radio and Podcast.init that podcast fans should check out.

Christmas Instructor Discussion

Thu, 22 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On December 20th we hosted our two last Instructor Discussion Session from 2016. We started 2016 with Post-workshop Instructor Debriefing Sessions that run twice (in different times) every two weeks and during the year we change its name to reflect the modifications made to better accomodate their inclusion on the Instructor Training pipeline as well as the increase of offers (twice every week). The Steering Committee is very grateful for all the work from the Mentoring Subcommittee as well all Instructor Discussion Session hosts without help would be impossible to provide all the hours of sharing experience among members of our community.

Minutes of Steering Committee Meeting

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

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The Steering Committee informs that the minutes of their third quarter are now linked on [the Software Carpentry Foundation page]({{site.url}}/scf/) as well on the [README of the board GitHub repository]({{site.github_url}}/board). If you have critics and suggestions related to the minutes please send those by email to our Secretary, Raniere Silva, at [raniere@rgaics.com](mailto:raniere@rgaiacs.com).

In the forth and last quarter, the Steering Committee will focus to wrap and documenting some procedures to make the transition to the next Steering Committee smoother than this year, something that started with the Amending Steering Committee Election Procedures that you voted last October.

Google Summer of Code 2016 ended

Mon, 05 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

As announced in April, we had some Google Summer of Code Students working with us this year.

Manage workflow for Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry instructor training

Chris Medrela, under the mentoring of Greg Wilson and Piotr Banaszkiewicz, worked on AMY implementing instructor training workflow that is already in use as we reopened instructor trining.

Result-aggregation server for the installation-test scripts for Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry

Prerit Garg, under the mentoring of Piotr Banaszkiewicz and Raniere Silva, worked on a web server that receive and store information provided by the installation script.

Three workshops in Brazil

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

In Brazil, like in many other countries that we are starting to run workshops, there are many open questions that we need to answer such as

how do we advertize our workshops?
do we charge a registration fee? If yes, how much do we charge?
how do we create a local community after the workshop?
how do we get new partners after create a local community?

Thanks to the work of many instructors like Anelda van der Walt, Belinda Weaver, Bill Mills, Lex Nederbragt, Selene L. Fernandez-Valverde, and Tiffany Timbers we are getting some hypothesis to the questions above across the world. In terms of Brazil, the three workshops that we ran in May added more data to help answering the questions.

Minutes of Steering Committee Meeting

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The Steering Committee informs that the minutes of their last meeting held last week are now available on [GitHub](https://github.com/swcarpentry/board/blob/master/minutes/minutes-2016-06-16.md).

As the Secretary, I’m sorry for the delay to release the minutes of the meetings due some experiments on the workflow to write the minutes. Now I’m happy with the workflow that we have in place that will assign one ID for all our motions making easy for us to refer them. I still want to make a few improvements on the workflow to make the minutes more machine redable.

First bimonthly report from 2016 Steering Committee

Wed, 11 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On May 8th and 9th the Steering Committee had an in-person meeting at Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory to conclude the discussions during the first two months and make plans for the next ten months of activities. In the following weeks we will write more about the results of the in-person meeting on the blog but for now we want to give you an overview.

Partnerships

Our Executive Director is doing an amazing job increasing the number of Software Carpentry partners. Last year, we were asked to provide a join partnership agreement with Data Carpentry and after months of work this agreement is now available.

Welcome to Google Summer of Code Students

Sat, 23 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Thanks to a lot of hard work from some members of our community and members of others open source scientific projects we are happy to welcome the students and mentors that will participate on Google Summer of Code this year under NumFOCUS umbrela.

Student	Project	Mentors
Bhargav Srinivasa	Dynamic Topic Models for Gensim	Lev Konstantinovskiy, Radim Rehurek and Devasena Inupakutika
Chris Medrela	Manage workflow for Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry instructor training	Greg Wilson and Piotr Banaszkiewicz
Akash Goel	Upgrade to datapackage.json standard for EcoData Retriever	Henry Senyondo and Ethan White
Patrick Kofod Mogensen	Improving the state of Optim.jl for JuliaOpt	Miles Lubin
Prerit Garg	Result-aggregation server for the installation-test scripts for Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry	Piotr Banaszkiewicz and Raniere Silva
Ramchandran Muthukumar	Presolve Routines for LP and SDP within Convex.jl for JuliaOpt	Madeleine Udell
Hannah Aizenman	Categorical Axis for matplotlib	Michael Droettboom and Thomas Caswell

This is the second year that NumFOCUS participate on Google Summer of Code and they have more than the double of slots from last year. Selecting the students was very difficult due the high quality of the proposals that are archived on GitHub.

Changes on Mentoring Subcommittee

Mon, 11 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The first quarter of 2016 is almost over and so far the Mentoring Subcommittee have been very quiet although we have continued hosting the post workshop debriefing sessions and the pre-workshop helping session.

We have been quiet because we were busy with the Steering Committee election and reorganization of the volunteer hours from our members since six of them (Belinda Weaver, Bill Mills, Karin Lagesen, Kate Hertweck, Rayna M Harris and I) were elected as Steering Committee members. In addition to this some members had to temporarily reduce their volunteer hours for various reasons but are now back to help us.

2016 Post-Workshop Instructor Debriefings, Rounds 04 and 05

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On February 23, Rayna Harris, Sheldon McKay, and Tiffany Timbers ran the 4th round of post-workshop instructor debriefing. On March 8th, Rayna Harris, Raniere Silva, and Belinda Weaver ran the 5th round of post-workshop instructor debriefing.

New lesson materials

Data Carpentry Genomics Lesson. Greg Wilson recently sent out an email about updating the lesson maintainer roles for Software Carpentry to jump-start finalizing the Ecology and Genomic lessons. These aren’t final yet, but the Iowa State University instructors spent about considerable time putting together a genomic lesson. You can view the Git repository with their lessons here.

2016 Post-Workshop Instructor Debriefing, Round 03

Thu, 11 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On Tuesday, February 9th, we ran the 3rd round of Post-Workshop Instructor Debriefing Sessions. Rayna and Raniere hosted the morning debriefing session. The even session was cancelled due to low attendance.

New lesson materials

Blogging as a Collaborative Git Exercise. The SFU group created a new Git exercise in which pairs of learners wrote guest blog posts for the others site. Then learners experienced conflict resolution with a controlled lesson where paid edited the same line of the guest blog post. This was an engaging exercise that allowed learned to see successful collaboration and conflict resolution. Stay tuned for a dedicate blog post from Bruno Grande about the exercise.

What worked well

A 5-day Hybrid Data / Software Carpentry Workshop. The 2016-01-25-Utrecht group covered a lot of material in this 5 day workshop (Spredsheets, OpenRefine, Python 3, Unix, SQL, Git, Make, and HPC)! While most of the materials were used as is, updates to the Data Carpentry Python lesson have already been pushed and merged.

2016 Post-Workshop Instructor Debriefing, Round 02

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

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On January 26, we ran the 2nd round of Post-Workshop Instructor Debriefing Sessions. Rayna and Christina hosted the morning debriefings while Bill and Raniere hosted the evening debriefing. A topic of interest today was on installations. Read on for details.

Thoughts on the “check installation” scripts

There is in an ongoing discussion about whether or not the “check installation” scripts for workshop pages should be updated. So, we asked the attendees how often these were being using and how useful they were. Some comments we received were:

2016 Election: Raniere Silva

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

My name is Raniere Gaia Costa da Silva and I'm standing for re-election to Software Carpentry Steering Committee because working on the Steering Committee in 2016 was fun and a great way to meet some of the amazing members of Software Carpentry community.

Background

I have a B.Sc. in Apply Mathematics from the University of Campinas, Brazil, and in the last year I worked as a freelancer software developer using most of the time Python and Javascript. This year I will move to the UK for work on the University of Manchester and collaborate with The Software Sustainability Institute.

Discussion Sessions

Sat, 02 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

At the end of last year [we announced a new checkout procedure for instructor training]({{site.baseurl}}/blog/2015/12/instructor-training-checkout-procedure.html). This new procedure has "an hour-long group discussion led by an experienced instructor" and we are looking for instructors interested in lead the sessions.

Welcome to 2016

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The Mentoring Subcommittee hope that you and your family had a incredible Christmas and amazing New Year.

We are slowly backing from holidays but we already have a busy agenda for January so we give a heads up for a few important dates:

Mentoring Subcommittee Meeting on January 11th.

This will be our first meeting this year and we will have some discussions about our plans for 2016. If you want to join us you will find informations at http://pad.software-carpentry.org/scf-mentoring. You can use the etherpad for suggestions or send them by email to mentoring@lists.software-carpentry.org.

Community Calendar Available

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

During this year we host many events for the community including lab meetings, sub-committees and de/briefing sessions. Unfortunately we fail to let everyone know of the events and to try solve this problem next year we are launching a community calendar. If you want to add the community calendar into your agenda you should use https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/oseuuoht0tvjbokgg3noh8c47g%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics.

Launching Pre Workshop Help Session

Fri, 04 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Organizing one workshop isn't easy and sometimes things out of your control go wrong in the last minute like the internet access on the room is very slow. After months of discussions of what could be done to help instructors and hosts when organizing their workshops and being prepared for the show time the Mentoring Subcommittee decided to test some helping sessions.

December Instructor Training - Announcing Selected Groups

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Thank you to all the teams that applied for instructor training that sent us applications. Selection of the teams was a very difficult tasks because

the applications were excellent,
we had a small amount of time to discuss all the applications and
we need to improve capacity to support the demand we see for instructor training.

The mentoring subcommittee has selected the teams that inform at their cover letters that booked a room for the instructor training at

Clarification about December Instructor Training

Fri, 06 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Since we announced that the applications for December Instructor Training we have received many questions. We are now amending the announcement to clarify some things that have come up.

2015 Post-Workshop Instructor Debriefing, Round 20

Sun, 01 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On October 13th, the mentoring subcommittee held the 20th round of debriefing for instructors. At this round, we have a great discussion text editors, workshop organization and challenges for learners.

Adrianna Pińska wrote a great post about the workshop in Johannesburg that you should check out.

2015 Post-Workshop Instructor Debriefing, Round 19

Wed, 28 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On September 29th the mentoring subcommittee held the 19th round of Instructor Debriefing and had some interesting discussions about our lessons and opportunity for learners after the workshop.

Call for Applications to December Instructor Training

Mon, 26 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This blog post was amended with the information from this other post.

This blog post was updated with the answers that we got so far.

As we announced previously, we will run another round of the free/open Instructor Training in December. People who are interested in participating in this round can now apply to take part.

Debriefing Sessions and Winter Recess

Sat, 24 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are getting close to the begin of 2016 and although there will be some workshops between Christmas and New Year the Mentoring Subcommittee will give a winter recess for the debriefing session. But there will be some debriefing sessions before then:

2015 Post-Workshop Instructor Debriefing, Round 18

Thu, 15 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On September 15th, the mentoring subcommittee held the 18th round of debriefing for instructors. At this round, we have a great discussion about teaching (or not) branches during the Git lesson and about Python packages used in examples.

GSoC 2015 Finished

Sun, 30 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This year's edition of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has now finished. We are very happy with the outcome of the work of the three students that worked under the NumFOCUS umbrella that we helped to coordinate.

Fee Waivers and Discounted Fees

Mon, 24 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A couple of weeks ago the Steering Committee met in person and one of the topics discussed was fee waivers and discounted fees for workshops and instructor training. Continue reading for our conclusions.

Join the Mentoring Subcommittee

Sat, 22 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The Mentoring Subcommittee is seeking for new members to help with the debriefing sessions and future activities. If you are interested in join us, please send a email to mentoring@lists.software-carpentry.org.

Solution for the Challenges

Tue, 28 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

One of the enhancement that we have in mind for the next release of our lessons is to provide the solution for the challenges. Having the solutions will help instructors speed up when preparing the lesson for workshops and learners reading the lessons. Before we start adding the solutions will be great to have one template for how it should be write. If you have some suggestions, please add it at this issue on GitHub.

2015 Post-Workshop Instructor Debriefing, Round 13

Sat, 18 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week the mentorship team ran the 13th round of instructor debriefing session and received feedbacks from the workshops at Brigham Young University (check Belinda's post about it), Johns Hopkins University, Notre Dame University, Pennsylvania State University, the Jackson Laboratory, the University of Queensland, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and the University of Toronto - Women in Science and Engineering (check Pauline's post).

Workshop at CERN

Thu, 25 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

At the beginning of June Rémi Emonet, Kwasi Kwakwa, and Chelsea Chisholm ran a workshop at CERN. Rémi has just posted a review. It went well, and there are a lot of good ideas in his write-up—from using a whiteboard for diagrams to the IPython Notebook's successor (Jupyter) and some semi-improvised intermediate material.

2015 Post-Workshop Instructor Debriefing, Round 9

Wed, 13 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This week the mentorship team ran the 9th round of instructor debriefing session. Thanks to Andrew MacDonald, Doug Latornell, Evan Morien, Ewan Barr, Isabell Kiral-Kornek, Jackie Milhans, Kara Woo, Karl Broman and Tiffany Timbers for the great feedback of the workshops at Northwestern University, Simon Fraser University, Swinburne University of Technology, University of Melbourne and Washington State University.

GSoC Projects for 2015

Fri, 01 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We're very pleased to announce that three students will be working on Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects under the NumFOCUS umbrella that we are helping to coordinate.

How to Send a Pull Request to the Lesson Template

Mon, 13 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

At the end of last year we split out lessons to have one Git repository per topic that we teach. To ensure that all lessons have the same look we use one template for our lessons. If you want to create a new lesson from scratch we already have a nice step-by-step guide but what about if you want to contribute to the template itself? In this post I will explain how I wrote my pull request for our template.

NumFOCUS Accepted as Google Summer of Code Mentoring Organization

Tue, 03 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A few weeks ago we announced that we would help NumFOCUS apply to Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a mentoring organization. Yesterday the list of mentoring organization was announced and NumFOCUS had been selected.

Applying to Google Summer of Code

Sat, 21 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

During last week's Steering Committee meeting we talked about applying to Google Summer of Code as a mentoring organization and decided to contact NumFOCUS to suggest that they applying as a umbrella organization for all the projects they support. NumFOCUS agreed, and for the past few days we have been racing to fill in the application.

2015 Election: Raniere Silva

Mon, 12 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A year and a half ago I read the announcement of the Mozilla Science Lab by Mark Surman and that way I discovered Software Carpentry. Months later, I was participating in the 6th round of Instructor Training, and since then I have:

taught at all 6 workshops held in Brazil,
improved the lessons and helped new instructors do so too,
suggested changes to the new layout of our lessons and helped in the transition, and
publicized Software Carpentry.

Volunteering with Software Carpentry is one of the things that I'm really proud of doing and I'd be honored be a member of the SCF Steering Committee.

Announcing the Lesson Validator

Fri, 05 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Thanks to the work of Andy Boughton and Raniere Silva, we now have a validator that determines whether lessons fit the new lesson template. This post explains what it does, where there is room for improvement, and how you can help.

Yet Another Template for Lessons

Tue, 14 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

After the splitting the repository post, Gabriel Devenyi and Greg Wilson wrote some suggestions for how the new lessons repositories should look like (see Gabriel's post about metadata and Greg's post about overall file structure). From my experience at the Mozilla Science Lab sprint I don't like Gabriel's preq metadata because I don't believe it helps very much. I also don't like Greg's proposal to duplicate some files in every Git repository, so here are some changes that I suggest.

Software Carpentry Workshop at Universidade of São Paulo

Tue, 09 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week Alex Viana and I taught two Software Carpentry workshops at the Universidade São Paulo, the biggest public university in Brazil. In both workshops we took them through Bash, Git and Python over the course of two days.

Software Carpentry workshop at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Sat, 30 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

At the end of this week Alex Viana and I taught a Software Carpentry workshop at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. We had around 30 learners of very different experience (from high school students to seniors professors of the university) and took them through Bash, Git and Python over the course of two days.

Software Carpentry at Brazilian Open Science Conference

Sat, 23 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week, Raniere Silva and Alex Viana attended at Brazilian Open Science Conference where they ran a Git course for Software Carpentry and Alex gave a talk about Software Carpentry (like the one that Damien Irving gave at PyCon Australia). Our workshop was a great time and from the feedbacks every student like it. One of the students said:

Very didactic, the instructors showed much care, dedication and attention with the students.

and another one

Very good, from the basic to complex in a easy way.

GSoC Projects at Summer Sprint

Mon, 21 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

As you may know, the Mozilla Science Lab's first-ever two-day sprint is in the next few days and all GSoC projects related with Mozilla Science Lab will be part of it. For more information about the plans for the GSoC projects continue reading this post.

Translating Software Carpentry into Portuguese

Tue, 08 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are very pleased to announce that we will run a half day workshop/advertising session at Open Science, Open Issues, an open science conference at Rio de Janeiro, and for that we will translate our Git lesson into Portuguese. If you If you would like to help, please head over to this GitHub repository, which has instructions and contact information.

Math Authoring Gap and MathUI

Wed, 23 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

In a previous post Greg Wilson wrote about the writing gap

between people who value the "I can see what I'm doing" of Microsoft Word and those who care more about the "I can tell what I did" of version control.

For STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) folks there is also the gap related to math expressions (you can use LaTeX to deal with math expressions but for beginners who spent around 20 years using Microsoft Word moving to LaTeX can be challenging).

Do you know that some people are working to solve the gap with math expressions?