Steve Crouch on The Carpentries

Incubator Lesson Spotlight: Intermediate Research Software Development in Python

Wed, 02 Mar 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/python-intermediate-development/
Lesson Repository: https://github.com/carpentries-incubator/python-intermediate-development

Learning Objectives

After this course, learners should be able to:

Set up and use a suitable development environment together with popular source code management infrastructure to develop software collaboratively
Use a test framework to automate the verification of correct behaviour of code, and employ parameterisation and continuous integration to scale and further automate your testing
Design robust, extensible software through the application of suitable programming paradigms and design techniques
Use a critical, reflective mindset to prepare and release your software for reuse by others
Manage software improvement from feedback through agile techniques

Target Audience

A typical learner is someone who is working in academic research and, needing to write some code, has gained basic software development skills either by self-learning or attending, e.g., a novice Software Carpentry Python course. They have been applying those skills in their domain of work by writing code for some time, e.g. half a year or more. However, their software development-related projects are now becoming larger and are involving more stakeholders, and they now need more intermediate software engineering skills to help them design more robust software code, automate the process of testing and verifying its correctness and support collaborations with others.

The Software Sustainability Institute's Guidance for Running Online Training

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally posted on the Software Sustainability Institute’s website based on lessons learned by SSI members.

Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

Introduction

The following is guidance based on the Software Sustainability Institute staff and collaborators running online training events which have become more needed due to the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Steve Crouch has run afternoon training events online for the Scottish response to the Royal Society RAMP COVID initiative; Mario Antonioletti, Lucia Michielin, Aleksandra Nenadic and Giacomo Peru have been running Edinburgh Carpentries events online; Aleksandra Nenadic and Steve Crouch have run and facilitated workshops and instructor training events online. Rachael Ainsworth has excellent online event management experience especially during the recent delivery of Collaborations Workshop 2020 online. Shoaib Sufi has oversight of the Collaborations Workshop series of events and moved the selection of the Institute Fellows from a face to face meeting to a successful online event which has taken place for a number of years now.

Cambridge Instructor Training 19-20 September 2016

Thu, 20 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last month, Steve and Karin taught an instructor training workshop at the University of Cambridge, sponsored by the R Consortium. The event was organized by Laurent Gatto, a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, with help from Paul Judge and Gabriella Rustici from the University of Cambridge Bioinformatics Training facility. 25 trainees from a diverse set of backgrounds spent two days getting to know each other and learning how to teach, and several have already completed the checkout process. You can read a full write-up on the SSI website, and we hope to be able to organize a repeat in the new year.

Three Flavors of Instructor Training

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

It's been a busy few months for instructor training: along with a two-day class at the University of Manchester, we also wrapped up a pilot of a new kind of multi-week course and a two-day version of the same material. We have also been training four new trainers, and have put the first complete draft of the training materials online. Here's some of what we think we've learned so far.