Operations on The Carpentries

Updating the Project List

Mon, 15 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Updating my description of where my time goes made me realize that our list of things we need help with had fallen out of date. The highlights are below; please see the projects page for details, and get in touch if you'd like to help.

Where the Time Goes (Version 2)

Sun, 14 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last November, I wrote a post about where my time was going. A lot has changed since then, including my workload, so here's an update:

Funding Software Carpentry Workshops

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Software Carpentry workshops are taught by volunteers, but hosts need to fund instructor travel, accommodation as well as our administrative fees of $750-$1250. While these costs are low, it can sometimes be a challenge to get funding for your first workshop, especially if others are unfamiliar with SWC. Here are some successful strategies that hosts have used to fund workshops:

Amdahl's Law and Software Carpentry

Fri, 07 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Amdahl's Law says that the speedup you can get by parallelizing a computation is limited by how much of the computational can't be sped up. For example, if 10% of a program's run time is inherently sequential, then even if you have an infinite number of processors, you can't speed it up more than 10 times.

The same rule applies to organizations like Software Carpentry. We now have almost 200 certified instructors; even working in pairs, and each teaching only once a year, that's enough to run two workshops a week, and we're training more all the time. But someone has to train them, and match them with workshops, and design new templates for lessons, and talk to potential sponsors, and those central activities are now limiting what we can accomplish.