Tommy Guy on The Carpentries

Num Wrongs Plus Plus

Fri, 17 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I was teaching Git to a room of roughly 25 students on day 2 of a Software Carpentry workshop and we ran into a problem that feels like a case study on the reason it's hard to move science to safer practices.

Workshop wrap up from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week, Software Carpentry hosted a bootcamp at the Costener's House, a converted monastery owned by the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, England. Fifteen participants took part, with experience ranging from "gap year" (about to enter University) to people with years of professional development experience.

One of the things that stood out at this workshop was the more advanced background of many of the participants, which allowed us to be more advanced with the material. The topics that seemed most popular were Software Engineering and Testing. From my perspective, it seemed like the hardest part of the workshop was the exercise we designed for the workshop, which was a scaled down version of the recommendation engine we use as an example in the Matrix Computation portion of our material. We did not use numpy, so placed a greater emphasis on preparing the data for further computation. While it took longer than I anticipated to explain and motivate the exercise, the payoff was that we could use the same problem on day 2 to introduce testing and databases. One of the difficulties in a 2-way workshop is avoiding the feeling of jumping topics every hour, and carrying this example through all of our Python work seemed to help tie the topics together.

The Trieste Workshop, One Week Later

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Katy Huff and I are back from Trieste, Italy, where we were instructors in the Advanced School for Scientific Computer at the ICTP. This was a different sort of workshop in many ways. First of all, it was 2 weeks long and the students were from all over the globe. Countries represented include Russia, Bangladesh, China, India, Pakistan, Albania, Iran, Palestine, Ghana, Nigeria, Chad, South Africa, Serbia, Romania, Ukraine, Argentina, Ecuador, and Colombia. The level of effort they showed was astounding: between our exercises and the project they brought from home, many students were in the computer labs until 11:00 at night.

Hello from Trieste!

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Day 1 of the Trieste bootcamp was a success! Katy and I covered the Bash shell and git. It was encouraging to see students in the lab after dinner working on their shell exercises. In general, the students are very enthusiastic. Later we'll try to list their home countries. So far, I've met people from Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Cameroon, Nigeria, Romania, Italy, Pakistan, Iran, India, and China. Their fields range from astronomy to nuclear physics to climate science.

Successful Bootcamp

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Our 2011 Software Carpentry bootcamp, hosted with help by The Hacker Within and Scinet, was a huge success. We hosted 25 students for two very full days of hands on introductions to Python, The Shell, Nose tests, SVN, and sqlite.

So what did we learn? We're still waiting on participant feedback, but a few things come to mind.

First, wow, how did we screw software installation up so very badly? Most of our technical problems can from inconsistencies between various Python builds. Some students installed numpy separately from python and ran into version mismatches. The demo packages were missing from some people's iPython installations (including my own!) That doesn't even mention Cygwin. We got by thanks to the help of the wonderful volunteers who were able to sort out most of the problems, but it's hard to pitch a produce that is that difficult to get up and running. Imagine if we tried to publish papers as inaccessible as our code.

2011 Software Carpentry Bootcamp Sold Out!

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Software Carpentry is teaming up with The Hacker Within to offer a 2 day bootcamp for scientific programmers on November 7-8. Forty tickets and ten faculty observer slots filled up within two weeks of announcing the workshop on campus.

So what are we going to cover? From what we know, the participants are a diverse group. They include Industrial Engineers, Physicists, Psychologists, and many other departments on campus. One thing they all deal with is data, and often lots of it. Data analysts need a place to store data, so we'll introduce databases using SQLite and version control with Subversion. Data analysts also need programming tools to reformat, clean, and analyze their input. We will spend over half of the time introducing Python, and we'll also introduce the shell.