Sarah Stevens on The Carpentries

Software Carpentry Governance Committee - Goals for 2026

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Looking for New Committee Members!

The Software Carpentry Governance Committee is excited to share our plans for this year below.

We are looking for a couple of members to join the team, as several of this year’s committee members had to step away due to other commitments. If you are excited about helping to shape the future of the Software Carpentry lesson program and would like to participate, please fill in the application form, or send an email to Toby Hodges to indicate your interest or ask questions.

Become a Lesson Developer Trainer

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Do you have experience in lesson/curriculum development? Want to share that expertise with others in The Carpentries community? Interested in helping to build the Carpentries Incubator community? If so, apply to join the upcoming round of Lesson Developer Trainer Training!

What do Lesson Developer Trainers do?

Certified Lesson Developer Trainers teach The Carpentries Collaborative Lesson Development Training to community members who want to learn how to design and develop open source lessons in collaboration with others. They lead training events and join community meetings with other Lesson Developer Trainers to discuss topics relevant to the training and lesson development in general.

Celebrate #GivingTuesday with The Carpentries Community

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hi Carpentries Community!

Today is #GivingTuesday, a global opportunity for us to use the individual power of generosity to support communities and important causes. At The Carpentries, we value all contributions and celebrate every act of generosity we offer! I have given a great deal of time to this wonderful community over the years as an Instructor, Trainer, Executive Council Member, local community organizer, and Lesson Developer because I believe sharing our training efforts across a community makes them better and working with The Carpentries makes my work better. Today, I am recruiting donors to contribute to the work of the organisation and want to share what I have learned about supporting The Carpentries financially.

Incubator Lesson Spotlight: Building Websites with Jekyll & GitHub Pages

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Incubator Lesson Spotlight highlights a lesson under development by our community in The Carpentries Incubator. In this edition, we look at the progress being made on the {{page.lesson_title}} lesson, and hear from the authors about how The Carpentries community can get involved with the ongoing development of this lesson.

Lesson Profile

Title: {{page.lesson_title}}
Lesson Pages: https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/jekyll-pages-novice/
Lesson Repository: https://github.com/carpentries-incubator/jekyll-pages-novice

Learning Objectives

After this lesson, learners should be able to:

create formatted page content with Markdown
configure their project to build and serve pages on GitHub
build a coherent site with multiple pages using the Jekyll framework
customise the layout and style of the pages on their site

Target Audience

This lesson guides learners through making websites using Jekyll in a web hosting service GitHub Pages. Anyone comfortable interacting with websites in a web browser and willing to learn how to produce website. Basic understanding of HTML and/or Markdown as webpage authoring languages is welcome but not a must.

Incubator Lesson Spotlight - Reproducible Computational Environments Using Containers: Introduction to Docker

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Incubator Lesson Spotlight highlights a lesson under development by our community in The Carpentries Incubator. In this first feature of the series, we look at the progress being made on the {{page.lesson_title}} lesson, and hear from the authors about how The Carpentries community can get involved with the ongoing development of this lesson.

Lesson Profile

Title: {{page.lesson_title}}
Lesson Pages: https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/docker-introduction/
Lesson Repository: https://github.com/carpentries-incubator/docker-introduction

Learning Objectives

After this lesson, learners should..

Know what containers are and how they can be useful
Know how to find and use containers created by someone else
Know how to create and share your own containers
Understand how to take the next step in your use of containers

Target Audience

Our target audience is researchers who want to learn how to use containers to help manage computational environments and enhance the reproducibility of their research results. Learners should have some experience with the Unix shell, e.g., from having completed the Software Carpentry lesson, “The Unix Shell”.

Alpha testing a Jekyll Pages lesson

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In the past several months, we have been developing a lesson, Building Websites with Jekyll and GitHub Pages, in The Carpentries Incubator. In November 2020, we taught this material for the first time in two mini-workshops hosted by UW-Madison.

The first time a lesson is taught is always an important step in its development. It is a chance to really assess how well the lesson objectives and material fit the target audience.

It is also usually the first time exercises have been tested by learners, and can expose weaknesses in the material that are difficult to spot from our perspective as a lesson author. In the life cycle of a lesson, The Carpentries refer to these initial trial runs undertaken by lesson authors as alpha pilots.

Geospatial Data Carpentry Videos

Wed, 19 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

Instructors at the University of Wisconsin (at both Madison and Milwaukee) recorded videos of the Geospatial Data Carpentry Workshop They then held discussion sessions over the course of a week to discuss the videos the learners had watched Learners really enjoyed this setup and gave really good feedback. Instructors are still working on setting expectations about the setup better.

The Setup

Since mid-March, when the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus announced it would be temporarily closing, exploring methods for successfully teaching interactive coding workshops has been a continual discussion among our local community of Carpentries instructors. As The Carpentries staff like to say, the transition to online workshops has been a “chopportunity” (challenge-opportunity).

Carpentries Community Discussion Host Onboarding Now Open!

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Carpentries Community Discussions are not only part of the check-out process but also provides a platform for all instructors (new and experienced) to discuss any questions (i.e. online workshop administration, how to adapt or using cloud instances they might have; or the opportunity to share unique teaching experiences post-workshop. With the move towards more online workshops, debriefing and sharing what worked and what didn’t is an important process of our community. The current number of hosts is a small fraction of our community so we are looking to expand the number and diversity of perspectives of hosts. If you are interested, please help us grow the community of discussion hosts.

Calling Local Midwest US Instructors!

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries community is growing throughout the Midwestern region in the United States! To support each other, we are starting a monthly community call for individuals based in the region to get to know each other, share experiences, and support each other with community building and workshop delivery. We’re looking for Carpentries Instructors across the US Midwest who are interested in growing their local Carpentries community and meeting other Instructors.

Running a Virtual Social Carpentries Meetup in UW-Madison

Tue, 12 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As part of growing our local pool of instructors at UW-Madison, we have started to host instructor social events more regularly. I planned to host a social one week after the most recent instructor training to aid in welcoming our newly trained instructors to the community.

We had moved instructor training online, because it is often taught remotely already, and are still working on a plan for the rest of our workshops this year. However, with the disruption all are facing in our communities due to the pandemic we could not hold the social as planned.

Extending Gratitude to CarpentryCon 2020's Task Force

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries’ CarpentryCon Task Force exists to organise and deliver the next CarpentryCon - a remarkable global assemblage of Carpentries members and friends. The Task Force started working together on January 22, 2019 and has not looked back! Our major planning milestones have answered these questions; the what, when and where? We are focusing on Growing inclusive, computational communities and leaders, between 29th June and 1st July 2020, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, United States. But beyond this answer, in the planning process, we ended with two top venues, leading to the inception of the annual CarpentryCon cycle from bi-annual, and a planned venue for CarpentryCon 2021 to be a pass-on baton to the next Task Force. Next year’s CarpentryCon has achieved a lot in the planning this year led by Christina and Ouso.

CarpentryCon 2020: Tips for Submitting a Session Proposal

Thu, 07 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

CarpentryCon is one of the most awaited events of The Carpentries for community building and networking. The theme for CarpentryCon 2020 is “Growing inclusive, computational communities and leaders.” This three-day event brings together new and experienced community members to share knowledge, network, develop new skills, and exchange strategies for building local communities of practice. The conference will be at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, USA from 29 June to 1 July, 2020. Come and help develop the next generation of leaders through practical skill-ups, networking, workshops, and breakout sessions.

IDC meetings 8/19/2019: Findings from community discussion surveys

Thu, 15 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

IDC Project: Findings from the Community discussion surveys

The Instructor Development Committee has been working hard on their first project for the year: looking at the data from the community discussion host and participants surveys. We will be discussing our findings at the IDC meetings on 08-19-2019. In advance of the meeting, we’d like to give you the highlights of our findings:

Main Findings:

Hosts and co-hosts/notetakers

In 2019, 21 Carpentries community members have hosted discussion sessions.
A little over half of these (12) are volunteer. The others are Carpentries staff.
On average, we have 12 discussions per month, and 7 unique hosts per month. That means each host has to take 1-2 sessions per month.
Only about half of the discussion sessions have notetakers
Over three quarters of attendees are attending the sessions for pre-post debriefs or instructor checkout

Attendees

The vast majority of sessions have more than 10 attendees
The number of community members attending for instructor checkout is greater than all other purposes by a factor 50.
Most attend Pre- and Post-Workshop Discussions, but the satisfaction is greatest for the Themed Discussions.
The discussion host ratings are consistently high
Most attendees would recommend these sessions to others

Conclusions

Overall, the data indicates that our discussion sessions are well attended, which is a good thing! However, only half of the sessions have notetakers, which can make hosting a session with 10+ people difficult. The satisfaction and host ratings are also positive. But, many sessions only have attendees who are doing checkout. While it leaves more time for questions about the checkout process, the attendees do not benefit from hearing from an experienced instructor about a real workshop. Thus, we have questions for the community:

Announcing CarpentryCon 2020 Dates, Location and Theme

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to the efforts of the whole Carpentries Community, we received a number of great suggestions/bids for CarpentryCon2020’s theme and venue. Many thanks to those who took time to suggest a theme or submit a venue bid.

Read more about the theme and venue below and bookmark the CarpentryCon2020 website for additional updates.

CarpentryCon 2020: Meet Up in Madison, Wisconsin, USA!

We are excited to announce that CarpentryCon2020 will be held on June 29 - July 1st, 2020 at the University of Wisconsin - Madison (Madison, Wisconsin, United States).

2019 Instructor Development Committee (IDC) Meeting Schedule

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Instructor Development Committee (IDC) would like to announce the schedule for this year’s meetings. They will be held on the third Monday of the month at 16:00 UTC and 22:00 UTC.

The June IDC meetings are on Monday June 17th at the above times. We will discuss our work on the Mentoring Program, as well as pitch and solicit ideas for what the committee should be doing in the future.

Soliciting Community Feedback

Thu, 04 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Carpentries is a lucky community

There are many people in The Carpentries who are enthusiastic about the mission of the organization and eager to contribute time and effort to developing and maintaining resources, and to serving on committees to help The Carpentries flourish. Of the core lessons for both Software and Data Carpentry, all lessons have been updated in the past month, most within the last two weeks. If you look at the community calendar for the organization, there are meetings nearly every day. For a largely volunteer force, that is incredible.

Installation Video Tutorials

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I recently created videos for installing the software needed for most Software Carpentry workshops. Links for these videos are now added to the lessons template for a workshop and listed below.

Windows:

Mac:

So far, we only have Windows and Mac videos. If anyone wants to make Linux versions, I’m happy to answer any questions. Or if you want to make the recordings and not the voiceover, I’m willing to narrate.