Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on The Carpentries

Workshops in March at Lawrence Berkeley Lab

Mon, 02 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I will be teaching a two-day Software Carpentry instructor training course on March 10-11, 2015 at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and a one-day course on web programming on March 13, 2015. Details are given below; the instructor training is open to LBL staff and to graduate students and staff associated with the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, while the web programming class is reserved for LBL staff alone.

Workshop for Women in Science and Engineering: April 14-15 at LBL

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We're very pleased to announce that registration is now open for our second workshop for Women In Science and Engineering, which will be held at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on April 14-15, 2014. We have a stellar roster of instructors and room for over 100 learners, so please sign up early and pass the word on to your friends and colleagues.

Second Round at Lawrence Berkeley

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week we finished up our second workshop at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. This time around, we tried a more free-form version of the feedback exercise in which students live-typed their feedback into an Etherpad at the end of each day. This went very well, as it gave us time to gather unique comments, get a rough idea of the amount of support for each comment, and to respond to some of the comments in real time. We asked three questions: what was good, what was bad/confusing, and what we didn't do or talk about that we should have.

First Round at Lawrence Berkeley

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We just wrapped up a two-day workshop at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and another is due to start tomorrow. Here's what worked and what didn't from the first one:

Good

Bad

Doing examples ourselves
Liked Python examples
Interactive
Greg kinda knows this stuff
Like the history lessons etc.
Went through a lot of things
Liked IPython Notebook
Like intro to Git
Intro to shell
Examples are incremental
Good mix of theory and hands-on
Sticky notes
Everything is open source
Liked keeping functions small
Liked red-green-refactor

Little more structure please
Lost with how to use Git
Wanted a cheat sheet
Wanted more Python
Not a break Monday aft.
Not clear how to apply all tips to all things
Wanted more structure Monday aft. (and I was teaching it)
Wanted cookies in the afternoon
Too many things at once
Poor choice of room
Need a book or handouts
Didn't see Python interact with R and MATLAB
More specific to specific groups
Bringing Python back to the shell etc.
How to save terminal session/notebook/etc.

Many thanks to Shreyas Cholia, Adam Stone, Nina Lucido, Geoff Oxberry, Matthew Brett, Paul Ivanov, and all our learners for making it a success.

Making a Difference at LBL

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Without any doubt, the best thing about teaching for Software Carpentry is making a difference for someone and getting to hear about it. One of our students at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, nuclear engineer Dr. Bethany Goldblum, was impressed enough by Katy Huff's presentation of git that she wanted her team to start using version control.

Bethany's description of her team's past code management practices is typical of academic projects, with many people modifying their own copy of a code until that "resulted in over 20 versions of the codes, each with bugs of its own." On their current project "a postdoc is in the process of developing the code, but now every time he makes a change, he uploads it to a different directory on our analysis machine and we just have multiple copies of almost the same code floating around. Unless one is careful, they may not know which code is the most recent version. I believe there is some fear there to undo anything that the original developer put in place."

Matt Davis's Great Californian Adventure

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Matt Davis (who works at the Space Telescope Science Institute, and has become one of our regular instructors) taught three bootcamps in eight days back in October. He has finally recovered enough to write a description of what he did, how it went, and what he learned. The two biggest lessons are:

Try to get to know your audience beforehand by talking to organizers and/or using surveys.
Try to plan bootcamps so that the students come from similar backgrounds and, if possible, the same department or lab.

Feedback from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Katy Huff, Justin Kitzes, and I wrapped up our LBL workshop yesterday. We had ~25 participants with a broad range of backgrounds and levels of experience. Here's our traditional table of good/bad feedback:

Good	Bad
can use python better	don't know how to apply git to work
covered lots of material	covered too much material
can use git better now	group felt too large for number of helpers
covered from basics to advanced programming	felt unprepared for git instruction
helpers were knowledgeable and nice	couldn't run VM, add system reqs
motivated version control well	python level was too easy
started with basics, had good help	need well defined goals for exercises
got exposed to a lot	group people by experience
all the material is available on GitHub	would have liked a more detailed description of course
learned enough to get started	didn't get any emails on the waitlist
have hope	getting info ahead of time
good overview for later	whole thing too fast
format - work through code live	topics jumped around
testing cases	maybe too language (Python) dependent, no objects
self-consistent complete package	burnt out at end of first day (fast)
inspirational	9-4:30 draining, more breaks between topics
great intro to vocabulary, how programmers think	didn't expect to program at end, was right
gained confidence from seeing experts	switch morning git with afternoon python on 2nd day
seeing github, advice on resources	not clear that mac users needed to install software ahead, why certain steps
had to do exercises, version control in beginner class	some hard to follow along, relies on previous success with commands
instructors :-D, with real-world experience	more relevant examples to audience, day to day data/problems
demo writing, troubleshooting, testing very valuable	what was xcode for?
	falling behind in python - 2 tiered exercises
	documentation needs comments
	is there help for release management?
	advanced math?
	third day - integrative exercise, case study - start to finish
	follow up project, final suggested homework assignment

The good news is that they liked our material and they liked us (and seemed to think we knew what we were talking about). The bad news is a lot of them had a hard time keeping up and a couple complained it was too slow. These are typical complaints of our shotgun approach to teaching to a random sampling of scientists. We'd like to do more discipline specific bootcamps where we can tailor things better. Another typical complaint was they they aren't sure how to apply what they've learned to their research. We're still working on that one.