Infrastructure on The Carpentries

End of Support for Our Previous Lesson Infrastructure

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Following the January 2025 announcement that The Carpentries would sunset support for our previous lesson infrastructure, styles, at the end of last year, the Curriculum Team has been archiving repositories that had not migrated to The Carpentries Workbench over the last few weeks.

All of our official lessons had been expertly transitioned by Zhian Kamvar, our former Lesson Infrastructure Developer and architect of the Workbench, during the initial rollout of the new tooling in 2023. By the beginning of 2025, the majority of the community’s lessons in The Carpentries Incubator and Carpentries Lab had either been created with the Workbench or already been converted to use it. This included many that were migrated to the Workbench during a hackathon session at CarpentryConnect Heidelberg 2024, led by Aleksandra Nenadic and Matthew Bluteau.

Introducing The Carpentries Director of Technology, Dr Rob Davey

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to welcome Dr Rob Davey to The Carpentries Core Team! Rob is joining us as the Director of Technology. In this role he will manage the technical requirements for The Carpentries’ programmatic and administrative teams to ensure that The Carpentries provides an accessible and inclusive experience for our community members. Rob will also lead The Carpentries data privacy and security efforts, and provide strategic direction for improvements to the technology stack used in our work. We are ecstatic to welcome Rob to the team!

Announcing our new Deputy Director of Technology

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A Message from Erin Becker

I am thrilled to announce that Maneesha Sane is advancing to a Junior Team Lead role and will now be serving as The Carpentries Deputy Director of Technology. Maneesha has been part of The Carpentries team since the very beginning - initially serving as a workshop coordinator and later moving into an infrastructure-focused role as Quality Assurance Manager. For the past 6+ years, Maneesha has served as a living example of The Carpentries values, bringing them to bear in everything she does. She brings a vast wealth of experience and historical knowledge to the organisation. In this new role, Maneesha will support the incoming Director of Technology (to be announced at a later date), and the growing Infrastructure Team. Congratulations Maneesha!

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.

From research to final product: the path to the design for the next lesson template

Tue, 25 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I was so excited to take on this lesson template redesign project with The Carpentries! As with any design project, it was paramount to define our objectives from the start to ensure success. This template redesign began with the below objectives that informed all of my process and choices:

The lesson template should conform to web accessibility standards.
The lesson template should be optimized for responsive screens and all devices.
The lesson template should be more navigable overall and support both learner and instructor needs.

Over the course of 10 weeks with these objectives in mind, I completed an end to end process to deliver the final redesign of The Carpentries’ lesson template early April!

Announcing the new Help Wanted page

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A new Help Wanted page was recently added to The Carpentries website, providing a list of issues in need of some help, from Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, Software Carpentry, The Carpentries, and Carpentries Incubator GitHub repositories. We hope this will serve as a single point of reference for trainee instructors completing the checkout process, and anyone else looking for a way to make an impact by contributing to our materials.

The page provides an accessible overview of all open issues that maintainers have identified as needing help, across many of our official and community-developed lesson repositories. The listing also includes issues from the repositories of other Carpentries resources, such as Glosario, and infrastructure such as the organisational websites and lesson template.

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.

Primera experiencia traduciendo lecciones online dentro de la CarpentryCon@HOME

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

See English translation below.

¿Y tú cómo traducirías esta palabra?

CarpentryCon@HOME traduciendo

En la sprint the CarpentryCon el 20-21 de Julio se comenzó a traducir la leccion de R para datos geoespaciales de Data Carpentry. Nuestro avance ha sido increíble, en unas horas se logró traducir el 80% de la lección utilizando la plataforma Transifex. (agregar la foto aquí).

Junto con David, Paula y Florencia compartimos toda la sesión, permitiendo unirse a gente de todo el mundo en la franja horaria que fuese más conveniente para ellos.

Upgrading R Lessons to use R 4.0

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Summary and timeline

In April 2020, R officially released version 4.0. One of the major changes was the removal of the default stringsAsFactors = TRUE when reading in data frames. This was tentatively announced in late July 2019 and officially announced in February 2020. While this change has been seen as a good thing by the majority of the R community as a step towards reducing common pitfalls, it produces an interesting pedagogical challenge for some of our lessons that use errors and warnings generated from this default behavior as mechanisms to introduce learners to the concept of factors.

Announcing Glosario

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

glosario is an open source glossary of terms used in data science that is available online and also as a library in both R and Python. Authors can add glossary keys to a lesson’s metadata to indicate what the lesson teaches, what learners ought to know before they start, and where they can go to find that knowledge. Authors can also use the library’s functions to insert consistent hyperlinks for terms in their lessons in any of several (human) languages, and anyone who has installed the library can use it interactively to look things up while they are programming.

Scaffolding Installation for Online Workshops

Fri, 24 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Installing software is hard!

If you have been involved with a Carpentries workshop (or any technical workshop!), you have probably noticed that ensuring learners have a working installation of the tools that will be used can be a significant challenge. Installing software is an acquired skill, and troubleshooting the installation process often requires some of the very skills that we teach in our workshops! Some Instructors pre-empt these issues by offering an “installation party” the evening before the workshop - however, folks who have the least experience with software installation are the least likely to recognise how challenging it can be, and therefore often the least likely to show up for these installation help events.

Introducing our New Lesson Infrastructure Technology Developer

Wed, 18 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I am super excited to join The Carpentries as the Lesson Infrastructure Technology Developer. Throughout my career, I have worked towards making complicated analytical tasks just a bit easier for scientists through both software and training. The chance to work with the wonderful people at The Carpentries on improving the lesson infrastructure is no short of a dream job!

I have just finished a stint at Imperial College London where I worked with both The R Epidemics Consortium (RECON) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) International to develop tools, templates, and training materials for field epidemiologists to perform reproducible analyses in R. I was previously a plant pathologist where I developed tools for population genetic analysis of clonal organisms as well as tutorials and workshops introducing plant pathologists to R, reproducible research, and data management.

Testing CodiMD

Wed, 26 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Collaborative note-taking is an essential part of what makes our workshops a success. Workshop participants enjoy being able to see the exact syntax of a command that was shared by an instructor, share tips, or ask questions. Collaborative note-taking is also a powerful approach for the many online meetings that take place in our community. Up until now, we have been using Etherpad as the solution to do this collaborative note-taking.

Gratitude from the Infrastructure Team

Wed, 11 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The infrastructure The Carpentries Team manages is mostly invisible to its users, and yet it provides critical services to our community members.

To name a few, we run our own Etherpad instance, we have scripts that ensures that our websites display up-to-date information about our [workshops]({% link pages/upcoming_workshops.html %}) and our [community members]({% link pages/instructors.html %}), and we [generate reports]({% link _posts/2019/10/2019-10-21-transition-to-typeform.md %}) based on the results of the pre- and post-workshop surveys.

New Etherpad server

Sun, 01 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Our Etherpad instance is a critical part of our infrastructure. Everyday, hundreds of community members use it to take notes during workshops, instructor trainings, and community calls.

On November 30th, we upgraded the server that runs our Etherpad instance to accommodate the growth of our community. In the process, we have also upgraded to the latest version of Etherpad and made a few visible changes.

You will notice that:

we are using a new look that improves the lisibility of the content of the pads;
it is now possible to have different headings and styles in your pads;
the date at which a message has been posted in the chat window is now visible.

We hope these updates to our Etherpad instance will make your work and interactions with the Carpentries community better.

Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Partner to Support The Carpentries

Wed, 06 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We are generating vast amounts of data, but it is not the data itself that is valuable—it is the information and knowledge that can come from this data. However, we are limited in translating this sea of data into discovery and solutions, because we have a limited set of diverse groups of people with the skills, perspective, and access to work effectively with data. We need to bring people to data—rather than just bringing data to compute or compute to data—and empower them to address their questions, reach their potential, and solve issues that are important in science, scholarship, and society.

Q3 and Q4 Project Work at The Carpentries

Wed, 25 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In May, we shared our vision and goals for our core team’s work in Q2. In this post, we lay out our accomplishments on that work, and also on our Q3 projects. There’s a lot that we’ve been working on! If you’re interested in a particular team’s work, you can navigate directly to their projects using the links below.

Business Team
Community Development Team
Curriculum Team
Instructor Training Team
Infrastructure Team
Membership Team
Workshop Administration Team

The projects we select for our quarterly cycles are designed to give us time to focus on our operational priorities (operational efficiency, accessibility, revenue generation, and compliance), while continuing to perform all of our ongoing work. Ongoing work includes supporting workshops, instructor training events, lesson development and maintenance, communications, and much more! Over the course of the quarter, we share our accomplishments and challenges with each other, stay in touch on how our individual work affects the whole team, and learn from each other.

Introducing Updated Workshop Request Forms and More

Tue, 17 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I am sooooooooooooooooo excited! I get to be the first one to tell you that the update to the Workshop Request Forms and the Workshops page of the Carpentries website is COMPLETE! Wooohoooo!!!!!

Updated Workshop Request Forms

With the new changes, workshop organisers no longer have to complete long forms with fields that are not applicable to them. We have made it so that you provide us with only the information needed to process your workshop. We have separated the Workshop Request Forms based on the various kinds of workshops that you organise:

Q2 Project Work at The Carpentries

Mon, 27 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Some of The Carpentries team at an Improv session in January 2019

Zip Zap Zop is a team building activity that The Carpentries team loved and stressed over in equal measure at an Improv session we all attended in January 2019. Standing in a circle, the game started out slow and we all felt comfortable with it, enjoyed it even. But as time went by and our facilitator nudged us to pick up the pace, we all experienced the adrenaline and pressure that comes with increased urgency and demand for our attention and whittled-down focus in any activity, and had the opportunity to empathise with the overwhelmed among us, and marvel at the resilience of a select few.

The Magic of Etherpads

Tue, 16 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

When I compiled the What is a Workshop? page for The Carpentries website, I tried to list the many features that make our workshops special.

Etherpads came a long way down the list, yet they are an essential tool for making things work. In an earlier post, I said the Code of Conduct was the most important of our teaching practies, but workshops would not run half so smoothly without etherpads.

Etherpads in workshops

When I teach, I preload the workshop etherpad with links to all the lessons to be taught. I provide a link to the workshop website, and to the installation/troubleshooting page, and to the Reference page of the lesson for those who want to keep open a tab with that extra help. I also add the names and Twitter handles of the Instructors and helpers (and various flavours of Carpentry, depending on what workshop is being taught). I add the workshop hashtag, and a list of those attending (from the workshop sign in list). Wifi connection details go on there, as do recommendations for where to find the best coffee on campus. The pad can fit it all.

Load Magic for Python and a call to discuss how we deliver exercises to learners

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post describes a teaching tip I shared at CarpentryCon 2018 and how it thrust me into deeper Carpentries involvement. It also aims to start a larger conversation about how we deliver exercises in workshops and how the lesson infrastructure can better support instructors and learners.

Let’s talk about exercises

One challenge I had before my first workshop was figuring out how to deliver exercises to learners. I asked around, but when I thought about myself as a learner trying to do exercises based on the descriptions I got, I imagined being confused and distracted. I found the load magic of IPython/Jupyter notebook to give exercises to learners that enabled them to focus on the concepts I was teaching, not fumble with tools. I shared the idea at CarpentryCon, got great feedback, and have thought more about how we could update the infrastructure to support it over the past few months. In The Carpentries, teaching and learning come first, so before the lesson infrastructure committee implements changes, we wanted to get more feedback on the general approach, and how instructors are delivering and would like to deliver exercises. I wanted to share my path on how I got to this question, why I’m interested in addressing it, and start that conversation.

Our Infrastructure

Sat, 25 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

As described in these posts from May, and October 2012 (which build on this one from April 2012), we use a complicated collection of tools to manage our work:

Software Carpentry continues to grow

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Traffic on the Software Carpentry site was up again in October, after a dip in September:

The sys admin at Enthought also cleaned the comment spam out of the Trac they gave me to manage the project. I have two dozen more minor tickets to file from email I've received in the last few weeks (much of it from Germany). Still waiting for people to start contributing content — any volunteers?

Procrastination: One of the Few Things in Life Nicer Than Toast

Fri, 23 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I finished rewriting the build system for the Software Carpentry course notes yesterday. Doing so was an extended form of procrastination: the system I built over the summer and used through the fall was adequate, but I wanted to clean a few things up, and then, well, I might as well make it easier for other instructors to add site-specific content, and make tables inclusions instead of inlining them, and mumble mumble mumble type type type...