Experience Report on The Carpentries

Steven Koenig: What I've Learned

Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I have been a PhD student at Technische Universität München, Germany since May 2012. My research interest is biopolymers: how to produce them, and what to do with them. Where computers come into play? Literally everywhere. And what I need Software Carpentry for? Literally everything.

Michael Hansen: What I've Learned

Wed, 25 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

My first exposure to Software Carpentry was during a bootcamp at Indiana University in March of 2012. I volunteered to be a helper, and found myself really enjoying helping motivated students learn how to incorporate the material into their own research. I've since volunteered as an instructor at a handful of other bootcamps (including one at IU again this past summer). In this post, I'll briefly discuss some "lessons learned" from Software Carpentry.

Lex Nederbragt: What I've Learned

Sat, 21 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I am a biologist with no formal training in Computational Science. A couple of years ago, the increasing size of my data forced me to stop using Excel, and switch to the Unix command line and scripting for my analyses. In the process, I learned what I needed by mostly by just doing it, but also from books, websites, and of course google.

Almost exactly one year ago, I attended a Software Carpentry bootcamp. I had heard about Software Carpentry and its bootcamps through twitter, started following their blog and became convinced that this was something I wanted to attend. At some point, I fired off an email to Software Carpentry asking what it would take to have a bootcamp at our university, the University of Oslo in Norway. The answer came down to 'get us a room and advertise the event, and we'll provide teachers'. This, in fact, was what happened, and as teachers, we got Mr Software Carpentry himself, Greg Wilson, who taught together with a local teacher (Hans Petter Langtangen).

Sarah Supp: What I've Learned

Sat, 21 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I have to admit, that when I first decided I was going to learn programming skills, it was for academic survival. I was decidedly not excited about taking a course. As a graduate student, I was lucky that Utah State University had a Programming for Biologists class, taught by Ethan White. Most universities still lack the infrastructure to teach these skills to scientists, outside of signing up for courses in the computer science department. Within the first week, I learned that programming is really like playing a series of logic games, and that it could actually be quite fun. Aside from practical skills, the most important thing I learned was not to be intimidated by computational problems.

Software Skills and Hummingbird Diversity

Sat, 21 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I am an ecologist. Traditionally, many ecologists spend part of the year outdoors, in the field, to collect data, and then spend the rest of the year analyzing that data and writing papers. With new sensors that passively collect audio, weather, or geolocation data, even a single field season can yield massive amounts of data. Add to that the pressing need for more long-term data (aggregating multiple years) and the problem of managing and analyzing the data becomes increasingly difficult for scientists without basic computational skill sets or strong computational collaborators.

Konrad Hinsen: What I've Learned

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

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

All of my research has been based on computation, starting with my Master's thesis (1989) on the dynamics of colloidal suspensions. Back then, computational physics concentrated on simple systems, and scientists usually wrote their own simple software from scratch. When I started to work on biomolecular simulations five years later, I discovered the sad state of non-trivial scientific software, written by generations of PhD students and postdocs who learned Fortran "on the job" and had the prime goal of getting their research project done with a minimum of programming effort.

Diego Barneche: What I've Learned

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

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I have been a PhD student @ Macquarie University since late 2011. I'm broadly interested in global patterns of biological diversity, macroevolution, statistical and mathematical modelling as well as programming for science (mostly R based but hoping to get into Python very soon). At present I'm focused on quantitative niche-based approaches that can better bridge macroecology and macroevolution, mainly through theoretical approaches such as the Metabolic Theory of Ecology and stochastic population dynamics. I've recently become an instructor for the Software Carpentry group which taught me how to combine teaching, which is an old passion, and improving my programming skills and writing better scientific code, which is something newer.