Reflection on The Carpentries

Waxing poetical in a Software Carpentry workshop

Thu, 31 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Hi everyone! I just finished running my first segment of a Software Carpentry workshop. I massively overprepared last evening and my notes for the first four lessons of unix shell are on google drive if anyone would care to reuse them.

In any case, one of my students (who had audited one of my other classes) made the following tweet: “Never heard anyone present fundamental computing concepts so poetically as @DenubisX @swcarpentry #MacquarieUni”

Workshop for High-Energy Physics at UCL, Part 2

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Three months after part 1, the second half of the UCL Software Carpentry workshop for High-Energy Physics took place on Friday 15th February 2013.

The experimental format with two sessions three months apart might have worked better if, as envisaged, we had managed to get an online discussion going in the gap. Unfortunately this did not work out. Despite several attempts at chasing up the participants, no-one registered or posted anything on the course web site. After talking to some of the students, I think their interest was just not great enough to overcome the bureaucracy involved in registering on the UCL Moodle server and the tendency to focus on their other (assessed) courses and research projects. Attendance was down from 65% to 30% (6 of 20 students), although those who did attend were clearly motivated, worked hard and asked thoughtful questions. With two helpers (James Hetherington and HEP postgrad Sam Cook) and myself as instructor, we had a student:staff ratio of 2:1.

Expanding Our Bootcamp Types

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Prompted by a recent email I gave some thought to our plans to expand the types of bootcamps we offer, especially when it comes to a sort of "next level" bootcamp and whether we might offer bootcamps that introduce traditional software developers to the world of scientific programming:

There is significant discussion on the best way to expand Software Carpentry. Longer bootcamps, advanced bootcamps, etc. At some point we need to start actually experimenting with these things, but we have many constraints, most notably a severe shortage of person-hours to devote to developing curriculum and staffing events. Scientists, it turns out, are very busy people!

Second Dry-Run of DiRAC Driver's License Exam

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

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Back in August we did an alpha test of our driver's licence for DiRAC in conjunction with The Software Sustainability Institute. In the spirit of iterative development, we revised our test in light of our experiences and two weeks ago we did a 2nd dry-run. Four researchers based at University College London kindly agreed to take part as examinees, Dr. Jeremy Yates of DiRAC made the local arrangements, and James Hetherington of UCL, a newly-appointed fellow of The Software Sustainability Institute, provided local assistance.

A Bootcamp at Mozilla

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We ran a two-day bootcamp at Mozilla's office in Toronto last week for people from local research hospitals. It seemed to go well: only 28 of the 37 who'd registered showed up, but with a couple of exceptions because of scheduling conflicts, everyone who showed up on day 1 came back on day 2. Many thanks to Dhavide Aruliah, Yele Bonilla, Mike Conley, Gabriel Devenyi, Fan Dong, and Blake Winton for helping out.

Teaching R at UBC

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This January we ran a second R-based bootcamp at the University of British Columbia over three days. It was taught by myself, Rick White, Bernhard Konrad, Davor Cubric and Jenny Bryan. The first day was a week before the last two days, and covered a basic introduction to R. The last two days was an advanced R workshop / Software Carpentry. We covered the following topics:

Novelty, Efficiency, and Trust

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the "big picture" is for Software Carpentry. What are the best practices every scientist should master? What are the principles of computational thinking? How exactly are we helping people? My latest attempt to put this all in a nutshell has three strands: novelty, efficiency, and trust:

By improving scientists' computing skills, we're helping them do things they couldn't do before.
We're also showing them how to do things with less effort.
Finally, scientists can have more confidence in results (both their own and others') that are produced our way.

The second of these, efficiency, is what sets us apart from other "computing for scientists" initiatives. On on side, supercomputing and big data have opened up entirely new kinds of science, just as radio telescopes and PCR did. On another, advocates of open access and reproducible research are changing the way science is done, and by doing so, making it easier for people to check and build on each other's work. Our goal is to help them implement all of these things without superhuman effort—to do with ten minutes of scripting what used to take an hour of mousing around in a spreadsheet.

University of Chicago in January

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This last Saturday and Sunday, Katy Huff and I had the pleasure of organizing a Software Carpentry workshop at the University of Chicago. We had 77 people attend in total and by the end of the day on Sunday we remained 45+ strong. (Frankly, who doesn't want to listen to me rant about documentation at 4 pm on a Sunday afternoon?!) This weekend was unique in that we had a host of first time instructors:

Montreal in January

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This weekend was the first time I had instructed at a SWC bootcamp, and I'd only observed one other (Greg Wilson in Halifax in July 2012). By the new standards for instructors Greg's trying to put in place I would probably not even qualify, but hey, we're in a growth phase right now; we take a few chances, eh? I felt my inexperience acutely, but despite that I think I can say that the bootcamp went well, thanks to a great group of attendees and helpers and my co-instructor, Jessica McKellar. The site organizers were Alex Demarsh and Rolina van Gaalen, and the other helpers were Greg Ward, Julia Evans and Jonathan Villemaire-Krajden.