Carpentries Lab on The Carpentries

The Carpentries Lab: Introduction to Deep Learning with Python

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are delighted to announce the addition of a new community-developed lesson on deep learning to The Carpentries Lab. The curriculum was peer reviewed in the Lab Reviews repository and approved for inclusion in The Carpentries Lab on 6th February 2025.

The Carpentries Lab was set up as a space for peer-reviewed lessons developed by the community. Designed to complement The Carpentries Incubator, where the community collaborates on the development of new lessons on a wide range of topics, the Lab is intended to serve as a platform for open peer-review of these community-developed lessons and the hosting of lessons that have passed through that review process.

Reflecting on our first Alpha Test of the Lesson Infrastructure Redesign

Tue, 06 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

This is an ongoing series of blog posts about the next iteration of the [Lesson Infrastructure]({{ site.url }}/posts-by-tags/#lesson-infrastructure). Find more about our Design Principles and our Path to the Design for the Lesson Website

As our community has grown in the past few years, it has become evident that our current lesson infrastructure—where implementing updates involves complex manual steps—does not scale well. It was also evident that the lesson development toolchain was intimidating enough that it was—in and of itself—a barrier to contribution. When this infrastructure was created back in 2016, we had only a few lessons that were maintained by a small group of maintainers who were able to install the toolchain and render them locally. We now have more than 100 official and community-developed lessons combined. Based on the feedback from our much larger maintainer community, it is clear that many find it challenging to keep the infrastructure up-to-date on their own machines.

Design principles for the next iteration of The Carpentries lesson template

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post introduces twelve design principles that will guide the development of the next version of The Carpentries lesson template. First, we provide some background and definitions. If you are more interested in the principles themselves, you can skip forward to the Design Principles section.

Background

In The Carpentries’ history (including Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Software Carpentry), we have learned a lot about lesson templates. We have had two main versions of the template that relied on GitHub Pages. As the community grows, we are adding more lessons through [our community-developed lessons]({{ site.url }}/community-lessons/) (The Carpentries Incubator and The Carpentries Lab) every week; and we are starting to see the limitations of our current workflow. Given changes in the tools and infrastructure, we are envisioning the next iteration of the lesson template.