Announcements on The Carpentries

Almost Ready: The Carpentries’ new websites and Handbooks

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

We shared that The Carpentries is on a journey towards consolidating its resources and lesson programs - Data Carpentry, Software Carpentry, and Library Carpentry - under one unified identity. To achieve this goal, we migrated the blog posts from the three lesson program websites to The Carpentries main blog. Shortly after that, we announced that the content on these lesson programs’ websites was pared down to only display each lesson program’s lessons, past and upcoming workshops, and its governance structure, with all other content incorporated into the main website of The Carpentries.

Lesson programs' websites content pared down

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The content on the three Carpentries lesson programs websites - Data Carpentry, Software Carpentry, and Library Carpentry - has been pared down to only display each lesson program’s lessons, past and upcoming workshops, and its governance structure. All other content pertaining to each lesson program has been incorporated into the main website of The Carpentries. Users of the satellite websites can be redirected from the lesson program websites to The Carpentries website. This change was effected on 29 July 2024.

Lesson programs' blog posts migration

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As of today, blog posts will no longer appear on the three lesson program websites. All blog posts that were on the Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry websites are now merged with the blog posts at The Carpentries blog.

In addition to this change, you will also see a pagination feature at the bottom of the list of blog posts to cycle through the list of posts. Also, you will see a new sidebar that lets you view the entire blog archive or browse posts by author or browse posts by tag.

First Data Carpentry Lesson Publication

Tue, 02 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Data Carpentry has published its first set of lessons on Zenodo! The path to get here has included hundreds of people who contributed to these lessons, taught them, used them and learned from them. All the feedback, perspectives and contributions have gone back into the lessons to make them better and keep them updated and relevant. With the Issue Bonanza and the Bug BBQ, the community became the reviewers and editors of these lessons before publication. True peer review!

Join our new Mentorship Program!

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Carpentry community is growing quickly! Over a hundred new instructors have been trained in the past two months. These new instructors join our community because they’re excited to help fellow researchers who are struggling to analyze their data and because they share our commitment to reproducibility and open access. In spite of these shared values, however, a third of our instructors never go on to teach with us.

Congratulations to Greg on his new position!

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

As many of you will know by now, Greg Wilson, Director of Instructor Training for Software Carpentry (and thus indirectly also for Data Carpentry), has announced that he will step down from his position at the end of January 2017 to join Shopify as their Computer Science Education Lead. We’re very excited about this new opportunity for Greg to continue to reshape how people learn computer and data science skills, and we are enthusiastic to see where his creativity and passion about democratizing digital literacy skills take him next. Greg is also the reason we are here in the first place, and so this is an opportunity to say thank you to him.

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.

Welcome Maneesha and Katarzyna

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are very pleased to announce that Maneesha Sane (pronounced "sah-nay") will be joining us in August as our new Program Coordinator. Having coordinated and managed public events and mentoring programs for several organizations in the Philadelphia area, Maneesha retrained as a software developer. She has been managing events and matching mentors to learners for over a decade, and we are looking forward to working with her.

Software-Carpentry-Inspired Book: Released and On Sale!

Tue, 14 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We're excited to announce the official release of "Effective Computation In Physics". This book was written by two Software Carpentry instructors, Anthony Scopatz and myself, Katy Huff. We were enormously inspired by the vision and work of the Software Carpentry community and expanded on that vision in the book to create a "field guide to research in Python." While examples and more advanced content are presented in the context of research in the physical sciences, the majority of the book will be useful to all researchers doing scientific computation. In book form, we were able to dive in and expand on best practices more deeply and more extensively than is possible in a workshop. We're extremely proud to have created "SWC in a book" as instructor Daniel Chen recently described it.

You (or your students and colleagues) can even get a 50% discount if you grab it before July 17th using the code: WKPYDP.

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.

Announcing the Creation of the Software Carpentry Foundation

Wed, 08 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

In order to foster Software Carpentry's continued growth, we are pleased to announce that we are creating an independent Software Carpentry Foundation (SCF). Like other non-profit open source foundations, it will decide Software Carpentry's overall scope and direction, manage its finances, and hold its intellectual property.

In order to work through the details have assembled an interim board drawn from a wide cross-section of our community:

Jenny Bryan (University of British Columbia)
Neil Chue Hong (University of Edinburgh / Software Sustainability Institute)
Carole Goble (University of Manchester / ELIXIR UK)
Josh Greenberg (Sloan Foundation (non-voting))
Katy Huff (University of California Berkeley)
Damien Irving (University of Melbourne / Research Platforms)
Adam Stone (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Tracy Teal (Michigan State University / Data Carpentry)
Kaitlin Thaney (Mozilla Science Lab)
Greg Wilson (Software Carpentry)

This group's mandate is to draft the SCF's initial bylaws and get the foundation legal standing, then arrange the transition to the first permanent board some time early in 2015. Until then, we will continue to do what we have always done: teach scientists and engineers how to use computers to do more research in less time and with less pain.

A MOOC on Practical Numerical Methods with Python

Thu, 14 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

As announced at SciPy'14 last month Prof. Lorena Barba will be teaching a MOOC titled Practical Numerical Methods with Python this fall, and the course site is now open for registration. Having worked through her excellent 12 Steps to Navier Stokes notebooks, I think this will be a great course, and I urge everyone interested in the subject to check it out.

The Research Software Engineer AGM and Hackday

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The Research Software Engineers community was founded to support the people who develop the software used in research. If you want be a part of the community, come to our AGM and hackday which takes place on 15-16 September at King's College London. It's a free event thanks to our sponsor Maudsley Digital.

Data Science Study Invitation

Sat, 24 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Katie Kuksenok, a graduate student at the University of Washington, is interviewing academic researchers who do data science to explore the barriers and challenges they face. If you would be willing to take 20-30 minutes to be interviewed, please get in touch: among other things, her findings will be used to help improve curriculum for projects like Software Carpentry.

A Lot of Bootcamps in the Works

Tue, 20 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week, we ran our first bootcamp in Brazil—many thanks to Raniere Silva for this writeup about what worked and what didn't. We'll visit several other new countries over the next three months, as well as running a bunch of other events—we'll post again as registration opens up for these:

Agenda for This Month's Lab Meeting

Tue, 13 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The next Software Carpentry lab meeting will be held at 10:00 Eastern on Thursday, May 22, and repeated at 19:00 Eastern on the same day. (You can use this site to translate those times into your time zone.) We will be voting on several small additions to the lesson material—please see the Etherpad for the list—and discussing plans for future additions, and the multi-site sprint in July. Conference call details will be on the Etherpad on Thursday morning; please add other agenda items to the pad, and we look forward to seeing you all then.

A Multi-Site Sprint in July

Mon, 05 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We'll be holding our first-ever global sprint on July 22-23, 2014. This event will be modeled on Random Hacks of Kindness: people will work with friends and colleagues at sites around the globe, then hand off to participants west of them as their days end and others' begin. We will set up video conferencing between the various locations and a show-and-tell at the end (and yes, there will be stickers and t-shirts).

We have booked space for the sprint at the Mozilla offices in Paris, London, Toronto, Vancouver, and San Francisco. If you aren't in one of those cities, but are willing to help organize in your area, please add yourself to this Etherpad. We'll hash out the what and how at the next lab meeting—it's a community event, so we'd like the community to choose what to sprint on—but please get the date in your calendar: it just wouldn't be a party without you.

GSoC Projects for 2014

Tue, 22 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We're very pleased to announce that two students will be working on Google Summer of Code projects we put forward, and that one of our regular contributors has received a GSoC as well. The projects are:

Office Hours for Code as a Research Object

Tue, 22 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Looking to learn more about how to get a DOI for your code? Interested in the underlying technology used to hook up GitHub (a code hosting service) and figshare (an open data repository)? Join us for our online office hours on Thursday, April 24. We'll be shedding light on the technical build done as part of our "code as a research object" project.

We'll be holding two sessions, one at 11 am ET for those in North America, Europe, and Africa, and another at 4 pm ET for our Australasian colleagues. These sessions are open to all, and are your chance to ask your implementation questions, gain a better understanding of how the prototype works, and peek under the hood at the codebase.

Have a question? Add it to the etherpad, where you can also find useful background on the project as well as dial-in information. We hope you'll join us.

Announcing NBDiff

Sun, 30 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I am very pleased to announce the first release of NBDiff, a tool for diffing and merging IPython Notebooks that is now available on GitHub and PyPI. NBDiff was created by a team of students at Concordia University in Montréal; our thanks and congratulations to Shurouq Abusalah, Tavish Armstrong, Marwa Malti, Lina Nouh, Boris Pipev, Selena Sachdeva, and Richard Tang. For more information, see the NBDiff web site.

Data Science Workshops in Seattle

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Via Sumana Harihareswara: the Community Data Science Workshops are a series of project-based workshops being held at the University of Washington for anyone interested in learning how to use programming and data science tools to ask and answer questions about online communities like Wikipedia, Twitter, free and open source software, and civic media.

The workshops are for people with no previous programming experience. The goal is to bring together both researchers and academics as well as participants and leaders in online communities. The workshops will all be free of charge. Participants from outside UW are encouraged to apply.

There will be three workshops held from 9am-4pm on three Saturdays in April and May. Each session will involve a period for lecture and technical demonstrations in the morning. This will be followed by a lunch graciously provided by the eSciences Institute at UW. The rest of the day will be followed by group work on programming and data science projects supported by more experienced mentors.

For more information, see the full announcement.

PyCon is Just a Month Away

Mon, 17 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

With PyCon just under a month away, there are a few things we want to make sure everyone knows about:

John Hunter Technology Fellowship 2014

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The John Hunter Technology Fellowship aims to bridge the gap between academia and real-world, open-source scientific computing projects by providing a capstone experience for individuals coming from a scientific educational background. The program consists of a 6 month project-based training program for postdoctoral scientists or senior graduate students. Fellows work on scientific computing open source projects under the guidance of mentors who are leading scientists and software engineers. The aim of the Fellowship is to enable Fellows to develop the skills needed to contribute to cutting-edge open source software projects while at the same time advancing or supporting the research program they and their mentor are involved in.

The Fellow receives an award of $33,000, which is meant to support the Fellow for 6 months of full-time work; The Fellowship can be started in the July 2014 - Jan 2015 time frame, and applications are due May 15, 2014. For more information, and to apply, please see the full announcement

Reproducibility Workshop at XSEDE

Fri, 07 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The reproducibility@XSEDE workshop is a full-day event scheduled for Monday, July 14, 2014 in Atlanta, Georgia. The workshop will take place in conjunction with XSEDE14, the annual conference of the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, and will feature an interactive, open-ended, discussion-oriented agenda focused on reproducibility in large-scale computational science. We hope to help promote a culture of reproducibility within the broad community of stakeholders connected to computation-enabled research, and expect our work to lead to recommendations address to this community.

This event will build on the 2009 Yale Data and Code Sharing Roundtable, which culminated in a declaration "demanding a resolution to the credibility crisis from the lack of reproducible research in computational science". To find out more, please see the workshop website, or send questions to reproducibility@xsede.org.

'Best Practices' Has Been Published

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I'm very pleased to announce that our paper Best Practices for Scientific Computing has been published in PLOS Biology. It presents 24 specific things scientists can do to get more done in less time with less pain:

Code as a Research Object

Wed, 11 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The Mozilla Science Lab's newest project extends our existing work around code as a research object, exploring how we can better integrate code and scientific software into the scholarly workflow. The project will build and test a bridge to allow users to push code from their GitHub repository to figshare, providing a Digital Object Identifier for the code. We will also be working on a best practice standard (like MIAME for code) so that each research object has sufficient documentation to make it possible to meaningfully use.

For more information, please see the full post on the MSL website. And please join us for our December 12 community call, where we'll be talking with Ed Lazowska about the newly-announced data science centers, and with Arfon Smith and Mark Hahnel about this project.

Release 2013.11

Tue, 10 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are pleased to announce the release of v2013.11 of our lesson materials. This release represents nearly 2 years of collaborative lesson development from 54 contributors, and features lessons for using the Unix shell to automate repetitive tasks, modular programming in Python and R, personal and collaborative version control with Git, unit testing, and working with databases. Contributors include:

Mozilla Science Lab Community Call for December 2013

Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The last community call of the season for the Mozilla Science Lab will take place this Thursday, December 12. The call is open to the public and will start at 11 am ET. Call in details can be found on the call etherpad and on the wiki.

News from the SSI

Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Two announcements from the Software Sustainability Institute caught our eye this week:

Their next Collaborations Workshop will be held on March 26-27, 2014, in Oxford. This annual gathering brings together researchers, software developers, managers, funders and more to explore important ideas in software and research and to plant the seeds of interdisciplinary collaborations.
Sixteen new SSI Fellows have been selected: congratulations to them all!

Advanced Python for Biologists

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

When I was writing Python for Biologists (see my previous guest post) I was extremely ruthless about leaving material out. I wanted the book to cover pretty much the same set of language features that I teach in my instructor-led introductory programming courses, which meant I had to limit the scope of the book to what an average, motivated beginner could take in in a full-time week of study. This restriction meant that, while I think the overall balance of material in Python for Biologists is still the most useful set for novice programmers, there are big topics that didn't make the cut. There's no mention of object-oriented or functional programming, nothing about Python's extremely elegant comprehension syntax, and nothing on recursion. As I was writing, I made a list of all these omissions, with the promise to myself that I would write about them some day.

Software and Research Session at AGU 2013

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A Town Hall Session on "Software and Research" proposed by four Software Sustainability Institute Fellows will be held at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco. If you are around, come and join the session on Thursday, 12 December 2013, at 12:30 PM in Moscone West Room 2004.

Centre for Doctoral Training at Southampton

Sun, 24 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Hot on the heels of the announcement of three new data science centers in the US comes this: £350 million for PhD training centers in the United Kingdom. One of them, at the University of Southampton, will focus on next-generational computational modelling, and we're looking forward to working with Hans Fangohr, Ian Hawke, Seth Bullock, and everyone else involved. Congratulations!

Creating a Forum

Sat, 16 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Every few months, someone asks why we don't have some kind of forum or bulletin board for Software Carpentry. The answer is that we've tried setting one up, but there's never been enough traffic to keep it going.

We're a lot larger now than we used to be, though, so we decided at this week's lab meeting to try again starting in January. Half a dozen people have volunteered to be stewards, and we've opened an issue on GitHub to discuss the features people want, experiences with other forums, and so on. Please add comments to that issue to let us know what you think.

Workshop at SIGCSE 2014

Sat, 16 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are very pleased to announce that Fernando Pérez, Peter Norvig, and Greg Wilson will be running a three-hour workshop on teaching with the IPython Notebook at SIGCSE 2014 in Atlanta on March 5, 2014. We'll assemble notes in this GitHub repository, and we look forward to lots of stimulating discussion.

Data Science Centers at UCB, UW, and NYU

Wed, 13 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Yesterday, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (who are Software Carpentry's main backer) announced $37.8M to support new data science centers at UC Berkeley, the University of Washington, and New York University. As UCB's Fernando Perez says in his blog post, it's taken a lot of work to get this off the ground, but the impact will be enormous.

We hope to help. Drew Conway's Venn Diagram shows "Hacking Skills" as one of the three principal components of data science:

November 2013 Lab Meeting

Sat, 02 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The first Mozilla Science Lab meeting is happening at 11:00 am Eastern time on Thursday, November 14; its agenda and connection details are on this Etherpad, and you're all invited.

Our monthly lab meeting will start immediately after the MSL meeting (hopefully around noon Eastern time, but it depends how long the MSL meeting runs). As always, we'll run our meeting again at 7:00 pm on the same day to accommodate different time zones, and our agenda is on this Etherpad. We look forward to seeing you then!

Reorganizing

Sat, 02 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

TL;DR: We're going to:

split our lesson materials for absolute beginners and people with some previous experience;
build some tools to manage those materials;
update and clarify the guidelines for instructor training, Software Carpentry's scope, making contributions, and use of our name and logo; and
use GitHub issues and blog posts to manage discussion of details rather than our mailing list.

Software Carpentry's Scope

Sat, 02 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

To help people figure out what's in and what out as we're reorganizing our material, I've drafted an explicit description of our scope inspired in part by AstroPy's idea of an "affiliated" package, which is, "...an astronomy-related Python package that is not part of the astropy core package, but has requested to be included as part of the Astropy project's community."

Domain-specific tools for machine learning and computational fluid dynamics aren't built into LAPACK or NumPy: they're stored in separate repositories and released in their own packages. Similarly, domain-specific lessons don't belong in Software Carpentry. Instead, they should build on our lessons, just as computer vision libraries build on matrix and image libraries. Our examples should be drawn from biology, physics, economics, and similar disciplines in order to appeal to our audience, but everything we include must be accessible to anyone who's done freshman science.

SSI Fellowship Programme 2014

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The Software Sustainability Institute is offering Fellowships with £3000 funding for travel, collaboration and running events, including Software Carpentry bootcamps. The Fellowship Programme 2014 recognises outstanding UK-based researchers who use and develop software. Online applications are open until September 27th, 2013 at 5:00 PM BST.

Share Your Code With the Molecular Ecologist Blog

Mon, 02 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Almost everyone has written or needed code to accomplish a task. Whether it is to automate a process or create the perfect figure, these scripts are useful, yet do not always merit publication. However, sharing these more widely would save the rest of the community from repeating the effort.

To help get all this code into the public sphere, the Molecular Ecologist blog is starting a new series of posts: anyone can send in a piece describing their code, and we'll put it up on the blog. The code itself will be placed on our GitHub page for easier access.

Submissions can be sent to molecularecologist@gmail.com and viewed at https://github.com/TheMolecularEcologist. Or if you are already on GitHub, join our organization to submit and maintain your code in that manner. More detailed information can be found on the blog itself.

Open Access Button Hackathon is Sept 7-8

Fri, 30 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Millions of people a day are denied access to the research they both need and paid for because of paywalls. It doesn't have to be like this, but we need your help to change it. We're making a tool to help change the system called the Open Access Button. The button is a browser-based tool which tracks every time someone is denied access to a paper. We then display this, along with the person's location, profession, and story on a real time, worldwide, interactive map of the problem.

It gets better though. While creating pressure to open up scholarly and scientific research, we help people work within the current broken system by helping them get access to the paper they need. We started building a prototype at the BMJ Hack Weekend, and came third place. But we're not finished yet and our launch is coming up fast! To help build it we're hosting a hackathon on September 7-8 of September in London. If you're a developer, have an eye for design or both we'd love to see you.

If you're not in the UK, you can join in from anywhere in the world—just sign up. And if you want any more information about the project, email us at oabutton@gmail.com or read more about the project.

Our New Operations Guide

Sun, 18 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Amy Brown, our indefatigable administrator, has put together some checklists for people involved in organizing and running bootcamps:

Software Carpentry Version 4 is a Go!

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I am very excited to announce that I am going to work full-time on revising the Software Carpentry course from May 2010 to May 2011. This work has been made possible by the generosity of our members:

I would also like to thank The MathWorks, the University of Toronto, the Python Software Foundation, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, whose support over the past 13 years has allowed us to help scientists use computers more productively.

New Challenges

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

As some of you already know, my contract with the University of Toronto runs out this spring, and I have decided not to seek renewal. I've learned a lot in this job, and had a chance to work with some great people, but it's time for new challenges.

What I'd most like to do next is spend a year working full-time on the Software Carpentry course—of all the things I've done, it's the one that I think has the most potential to make scientists' lives better. My goal is to raise approximately CDN$25,000 from each of half a dozen sponsors so that I can reorganize and revamp the content, add screencasts and video lectures, and generally drag it into the 21st Century. An abbreviated proposal is included below the cut—if you or anyone you know would be interested in discussing possibilities, please give me a shout.