Hackathons on The Carpentries

Instructor Curriculum Updated

Mon, 14 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Sixty-seven pull requests were successfully merged during the recent update of the Software and Data Carpentry instructor training curriculum. Most of these PRs were merged during the recent 24-hour Bug BBQ that ran over 3-4 August. More than 20 instructors and trainers were involved with the update. A few pull requests remain to be merged before the material is ready to be re-released. This should happen by the end of August.

The Endless Sprint

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The recent Library Carpentry sprint exceeded my expectations, and then some!

Around 107 people signed up on our organising etherpad, either to work remotely or to contribute at one of the 13 sites in seven countries around the globe. That’s a big step up from the 2016 numbers of six sites and around twenty people working on the material.

The sprint was organised as part of the 2017 Mozilla Global Sprint. Library Carpenters comprised around one-sixth of that sprint workforce, and our more than 850 GitHub events - pull requests, forks, issues raised, commits and merges - outpaced the rest of the field by miles.

Library Carpentry sprint in June

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Lesson maintenance is necessarily an ongoing task, especially with fledgling lessons where workshops taught reveal gaps or issues with existing material. Development of new lessons may also spring from the same source. Who hasn’t thought, after teaching: “Wouldn’t it be great if we could add x?”

But lesson maintenance and new development are probably best done as a shared activity, which is why the Library Carpentry community has signed up to work on lessons intensively during the 2017 Mozilla Science Lab global sprint on 1-2 June. Check out our sign up etherpad for information about our plans.

Updating Library Carpentry

Mon, 06 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A global team worked to update the [Library Carpentry](https://github.com/LibraryCarpentry) curriculum and lesson material at this year’s [Mozilla Science Lab Global sprint](https://science.mozilla.org/programs/events/global-sprint-2016).

The work kicked off in Brisbane, where Clinton Roy, Natasha Simons and I worked with Carmi Cronje in Sydney to start the ball rolling. Matthias Liffers came online in Perth two hours later. At 5.30 pm our time, we handed over to teams in South Africa, the Netherlands, and the UK, led by Anelda van der Walt, Mateusz Kuzak, and James Baker respectively.

rOpenSci Hackathon

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

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The rOpenSci team has been cranking out a large number of software tools over the past several months. As regular blog readers are aware, our software packages provide programmatic access to a diverse and extensive trove of scientific data. More recently we've expanded our efforts to build more general purpose and cross-domain tools. These include tools for reading, writing, integrating and publishing data, a unit testing platform for data, and a mapping engine that can visualize various kinds of spatial data. Many of our projects are inspired by ad hoc discussions with other scientists and software developers both online (often on Twitter and GitHub) and offline. Several of these folks are now regular contributors to the project. To foster more such collaborations and drive new software innovations, we are excited to announce our first developer meeting next month at GitHub's headquarters in San Francisco. This meeting is made possible by support from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation and GitHub.