Wolfgang Hayek on The Carpentries

Software Carpentry workshop in severe conditions

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Usually the main struggles preceding Software and Data Carpentry workshops involve the laptop setup, signposting the room and making sure the washrooms are unlocked. But the recent workshop in New Zealand, held at National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) was facing much more extreme conditions.

The day before the workshop New Zealand was hit by what is now known Kaikoura earthquake. Wellington, where the NIWA offices are, was also affected. Fortunately, NIWA buildings remained safe and the hosts, Fabrice Cantos and Wolfgang Hayek, decided to go forward with the workshop.

Software Carpentry Workshop Attendance: a New Zealand Perspective

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Having taught and helped at a series of workshop over the past few months Tom Kelly, PhD Candidate in Genetics at the University of Otago, wrote up some of his reflections on the issues related to workshop attendance. This spurred further discussion via email among the New Zealand instructors. We decided to put these thoughts together in hope that this could help other sites struggling with the attendance problems.

Software Carpentry and HPC class hits Palmerston North (New Zealand)

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On 7th and 8th June 2016 we gave a Software Carpentry training consisting of four blocks. We started with bash (presented by Markus, Landcare Research Hamilton), Python (Ben, Landcare Research Palmerston North), went on to git (Hannes, Massey University) and finally had a session around using High Performance Computing (HPC) as it is offered by the NeSI, the New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (Wolfgang, NIWA Wellington and NeSI). This last session is not one of the official SWC modules, but was taylor-made and rounded up the training very well, as it used the skills acquired during the preceding three sessions. It included hands-on training, working remotely on the NeSI Pan cluster in Auckland; all attendees managed to log on and submit jobs to the SLURM scheduler successfully.

This was a very successful workshop with almost 40 attendants, organised and presented by a mixed team of new and more experienced instructors. The participants were very responsive and there was a lot of learning happening for the attendees and for instructors. The feedback was mostly positive and the negative feedback was very constructive. An aspect mentioned by several participants was that the number of attendees was probably too large, possibly with respect to the venue size - something we have to consider in the future. The logistical support with refreshments, received from the Massey in the person of Colleen Blair, was behind the scenes, but timely and well prepared. So we had a hydrated group, and a lot of fun was had by all. The new friendships made will hopefully lead to more cooperation between colleagues. Hannes’ favourite critique was: “It is impossible to listen and type as well!” – Note to self :)