Lab Meeting on The Carpentries

April 2015 Lab Meeting

Fri, 03 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We held our second lab meeting of 2015 on April 1st, and had near-record turnout. Notes from the Etherpad are included below; the highlights are:

We hope to have a first-quarter financial report by the end of this month. The good news is that there's lots of interest in partnerships and affiliations; the bad is that we're not collecting admin fees from nearly as many workshops as we need to.
We will charge for-profit organizations four times as much for organizing workshops as we charge universities and other non-profits; the extra money will be used to underwrite workshops for places that otherwise might not be able to afford to host them.
We have created a LinkedIn group for Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry instructors — if you're a LinkedIn user, you're welcome to join. Leigh Sheneman and Lynne Williams have volunteered to moderate the group.
Peter van Heusden and Gabriel Devenyi have volunteered to help with system administration — our thanks to Jon Pipitone and David Rio for all their help over the past couple of years.
Noam Ross is putting together a lesson on how to get unstuck, and Christina Koch is managing work on some extra Unix shell material.
We hope to have the current lessons tidied up by the end of April so that we can give them DOIs, and thereby make it easier for everyone who has contributed to them to get proper credit for their work.

April 2015 Lab Meeting

Fri, 20 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The next Software Carpentry online lab meeting will take place on Wednesday, April 1 (no, really) at 10:00 and 19:00 Eastern time. (As usual, we will hold the meeting twice to accommodate people in different time zones.) Please sign up on this Etherpad to let us know whether you'll be attending, and if so, and what time. We'll post an agenda next week; if there's anything you'd particularly like to discuss, please let us know.

January 2015 Lab Meeting

Mon, 12 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We will hold our next online lab meeting at 11:00 and again at 19:00 Eastern time on Thursday, January 22, 2015. People who are standing for election will have a chance to talk about what they hope to do and to answer questions from other members, and we'll present updates on our finances and on our new workshop and lesson templates. If you're planning to attend, please add yourself to this Etherpad. We look forward to seeing you then.

Reminder: Lab Meeting on Thursday

Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Just a reminder that our last online lab meeting for 2014 will be held at 10:00 am Eastern time on Thursday, December 4, and will be repeated at 7:00 pm Eastern on the same day. We will be making several big announcements, so if you're planning to attend, please add yourself to the Etherpad at https://etherpad.mozilla.org/swc-labmeeting-2014-11 so that we have an idea of numbers. We look forward to seeing you Thursday.

Announcing November 2014 Lab Meeting

Fri, 14 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Our last online lab meeting for 2014 will be held at 10:00 am Eastern time on Thursday, December 4, and will be repeated at 7:00 pm Eastern on the same day. (We had originally planned to have it on November 27, but that would conflict with American Thanksgiving.) If you're planning to attend, please add yourself to the Etherpad at https://etherpad.mozilla.org/swc-labmeeting-2014-11 so that we have an idea of numbers. We look forward to seeing you in a few weeks.

And yes, we're calling it the November lab meeting even though it's in December, because it just wouldn't be programming without an off-by-one error...

September 2014 Lab Meeting Report

Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

After a two-month break for a sprint and some holidays, we held another monthly lab meeting this week. About 50 people showed up to talk about issues large and small; the key points are below.

September 2014 Lab Meeting

Fri, 12 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

After taking a break in July for our sprint, and in August because people were on holiday, doing fieldwork, or both, we will resume our monthly online lab meetings this month. As always, we'll hold the meeting twice to accommodate time zones, childcare commitments, and the like; the first round will be 18:30-19:30 Eastern time on Thursday, Sept 25, and the second will be 11:00-12:00 Eastern time on Friday, Sept 26. We'll post connection details and the agenda closer to the time; if you have anything you'd like included, please send us mail.

Summary of June 2014 Lab Meeting

Fri, 27 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

At our monthly lab meeting yesterday (June 26), we discussed a wide range of topics (though only about half as much as was on the agenda). Details notes and votes are below; the key points are:

We would like to do what we can to help the careers of people who volunteer for Software Carpentry. In particular, we'd like to find a way to highlight people who have taught lots of bootcamps, contributed lots of material, or both, without discouraging people who haven't, or getting into a situation in which bootcamp hosts ask, "Why aren't you sending your most experienced people to us?" We've opened a GitHub issue for people who'd like to discuss this topic, and we'd be grateful if you could share experiences with other systems and suggestions about what we could do.
We will have a meeting on Thursday, July 3 to discuss plans for the July 22-23 sprint. The time and connection details will be posted here on July 2.
People were either neutral or in favor of switching to Python 3. There was concern about compatibility, but it seems that most scientific packages are now Py3-compatible (and that there are some that only work with Py3, and not with Py2). In practice, this will mean:
- changing what people have on their machine when they leave the bootcamp, and
- minor modifications to our lessons (e.g., print as a function).
By default, Mercurial launches a GUI diff/merge tool when there's a conflict rather than displaying a textual diff. Novices seem to find side-by-side merge easier to work with, which raises the question: should we use a graphical tool for diff and merge when teaching Git as well? Again, most people were either neutral or in favor, subject to ease of installation. We'll try this at a couple of workshops in the coming months and report back.
Should we install Matt Davis's ipythonblocks module by default? Nobody was opposed, but it turned out that only a handful of people actually use it in teaching. We'll poll our instructors to find out more about usage before making a final decision.
In order to make it easy for people who want to teach regular expressions to do so, we'll integrate the software that runs regexpal.com (which ironically is down at the time of this writing) into the bc repo so that instructors can create a page in their bootcamp site where learners can play around.
Jonah Duckles has created a pull request that would change the way installation instructions are managed. Instead of editing _includes/setup.html, instructors would add a list of topics to the header of index.html that Jekyll's templating logic would use to control what is and isn't displayed. Most people were in favor, so we'll merge this once the PR is finished.
Many people are still not happy with the way our lesson materials are organized, or with what pre-requisite knowledge we actually expect. We will organize a meeting for next Thursday (July 3) to talk about options, then open a discussion issue on GitHub if we can come up with concrete alternatives.
Raniere Silva has been working over the last few weeks to generate EPUB and PDF from our materials. The goal is to allow anyone who wants to produce book-form notes to do so for use in a regular class, to give to learners after a bootcamp, or for self-study. He's been making good progress, but there are still lots of small problems (particularly with the PDF). We'll be hacking on this at the sprint.

Reminder: Lab Meeting Tomorrow

Wed, 25 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Our monthly online lab meetings will take place tomorrow (Thursday, June 26) at 10:00 am and 7:00 pm Eastern time. Please have a look at this Etherpad to see what we'll be discussing and voting on. We look forward to seeing you there.

Reminder: June 2014 Lab Meeting

Tue, 17 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The next Software Carpentry lab meeting will take place next week at 10:00 am and 7:00 pm Eastern time on Thursday, June 26. (My apologies to people in Australia: I promised we'd hold the evening meeting first this time around, but unfortunately that slot conflicts with instructor training.) Our agenda is up on this Etherpad; we'll be discussing plans for the July sprint and voting on several pull requests and proposals. If you'd like to cast a few votes, please take a few minutes before the meeting to look through the items that are on the agenda.

Announcing June 2014 Lab Meeting

Mon, 09 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The next of our monthly online lab meetings will take place on Thursday, June 26, at 10:00 am and 7:00 pm Eastern time. (As always, we'll hold it twice to accommodate people's work schedules and time zones.) We will update this Etherpad with agenda items as the date approaches.

Summary of May 2014 Lab Meeting

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

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Our monthly online lab meeting took place this past Thursday (May 22), and for the first time it included voting on pull requests and other issues. All the notes from the Etherpad are included below, but the high points are:

The Mozilla Science Lab is hiring a developer and a community manager.
People and projects that would like to take part in our global sprint on July 22-23 are invited to sign up on this Etherpad. We won't just work on Software Carpentry curriculum and tooling: related projects are welcome to use this opportunity to bring their communities together as well.
Arliss Collins and others will try to simplify the workflow for creating and managing bootcamps. (Right now, we rely on five different online systems, and most of the administrators we work with at host institutions can't make heads or tails of them.) If you would like to help, please let us know.
We will add people who want to be helpers at bootcamps to our instructors mailing list rather than creating yet another list for reaching them.
We voted on the following pull requests:
- Extra lessons will go under existing directories (e.g., novice/git/) rather than in a top-level extras directory.
- We won't try to standardize usage of "parameter" and "argument", since most instructors use them idiosyncratically and/or interchangeably.
- We will incorporate the new lessons on Mercurial as soon as they're done.
- We will merge the lessons on scikit-learn, Python string formatting, common Python error messages, and setting up SSH keys for GitHub.
- We won't include the lesson on tmux—people felt it was too specialized—and will ask that the lesson on text data mining in the shell be re-worked.
We also voted on the following proposals for new lessons:
- Using Excel properly, using Make to manage data pipelines, and regular expressions were all approved.
- The draft lesson on creating and syndicating data on the web was deferred (only a few people had looked at it).
- People liked the idea of lessons on statistics with Pandas and managing geospatial data, but we will need volunteers to take the lead.

Our next lab meeting, on June 26, will primarily be devoted to planning for our July 22-23 sprint. We look forward to seeing lots of you at both.

Lab Meeting Reminder

Wed, 21 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Our monthly lab meeting will take place on Thursday, May 22 at 10:00 am and again at 7:00 pm, Eastern time. There's a lot to discuss, so please take a moment beforehand to go through the lab meeting Etherpad and see if there are any pull requests or enhancement proposals that you are particularly interested in.

We look forward to seeing you online.

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.

April 2014 Lab Meeting

Fri, 25 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We held another online lab meeting yesterday, which covered a fairly wide range of topics. The notes are below; comments about what we missed, and suggestions for the next lab meeting, are very welcome.

Announcing Our Next Lab Meeting

Thu, 27 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Our next online lab meeting will be held on Thursday, April 24, 2014. As always, we'll run it twice to accommodate different time zones; please keep an eye on this blog, our Twitter account, and the mailing lists for connection details.

Summary of Feb 2014 Lab Meeting

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We held a lab meeting last week. 48 people attended in two sessions (to accommodate different time zones); the main points are summarized below.

Lab Meeting (Feb 2014)

Sun, 23 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We're having our first lab meeting of 2014 this week. As usual, we'll hold it twice to accommodate different time zones: once at 20:00 Eastern on Wednesday, February 26, and again at 11:00 Eastern on Thursday, February 27. Connection details will be posted on the meeting's Etherpad, and everyone is welcome both to attend and to add agenda items to the 'pad beforehand.

October 2013 Lab Meeting

Fri, 04 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

25 people attended our monthly (ish) online lab meeting yesterday, during which we announced and discussed a wide variety of topics. The detailed summary is below the fold, but the key action items are:

Please take a moment to read Kaitlin Thaney's post about what's going on with the Mozilla Science Lab. We hope to announce some new projects at MozFest in London in a couple of weeks, and more shortly after that.
There's been a flurry of pull requests and comments on lesson material in the past couple of weeks, which is great news for our sustainability. To keep the momentum going, please either send at least one pull request on the teaching materials, or make at least one comment on someone else's pull request, by Monday Oct 14.
In aid of this, please get in touch if you're willing to spend a bit of time in the next couple of weeks helping instructors-in-training learn a bit more about GitHub and pull requests.
Finally, please each introduce us to one new potential bootcamp host: we have a bunch of new instructors, so we're now able to take on more load.

August 2013 Lab Meeting

Fri, 23 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We held another of our semi-regular online lab meetings yesterday, complete with a theme song. We ran the meeting twice to accommodate different time zones; those present were:

August 2013 Lab Meeting

Mon, 19 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We will have an online lab meeting on Thursday, August 22, 2013 to discuss changes to the website, plans for the coming few months, and common questions that really ought to be answered in the FAQ or somewhere else. Everyone is welcome to join in; to do so, head over to this Etherpad at either 11:00 or 19:00 Toronto time, and hop on the conference call described there as well. (We're holding the same meeting twice to accommodate different time zones; please try to sign in a few minutes before the top of the hour so that we can start more or less on time. Please also check the World Clock Meeting Planner to see when the times listed are for you.)

June 2013 Lab Meeting

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Earlier this week, Software Carpentry had its first online lab meeting since October 2012. In attendance were: