University of Alberta on The Carpentries

Feedback from Alberta

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Our two-day workshop at the University of Alberta wound up a couple of hours ago. We had quite a few no-shows this time (which was annoying, given how many people were waitlisted), but those who did come seemed to get a lot out of it:

Good

Bad

Room
Mix of talking & doing
Stickies
Version control
Hands on
Link on online video
Python
Clear speaking
Computer in lab (using linux)
Automatic versioning
Programming in windows in Cygwin
Philosophy
Discussion of productivity
Good reading suggestions
Functional programming
Overall workflow
I feel more competent (morale boost)
Researched anectodes, backed with data
Website
TDD
Instructor's body language
Helpers

Coffee hard
Need more projectors
Having to keep stickies
No testing
Not enough depth
Not convinced about version control
Too fast on day 1, too slow on day 2
Need levels
Came late
Not enough Python
No lunch
No time for notes
More version control
Too short break
No shows
Pace (a little fast)
Supervisor wasn't here (need to convince her)
Where is the code (dropbox?)
Bad chairs
Windows alienation
Mailing list
Making DB (no info)

Many thanks to Rose, Neil, and Paul for making it possible.

Post-Mortem

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Today was the last day of the course, so we spent the morning talking about what had gone well and what had not. The high and low points were:

Good

The course was fun.
The TAs were fantastic.
The format (one hour of lecture plus two hours of lab, twice a day) worked well.
Enjoyed the parts where the instructors programmed live.
Liked the emphasis on working practices that complement coding.
Liked the spread of topics, and the variability of things that are useful in all the different fields.
Liked the pair programming.
Welcomed exposure to standard libraries that weren't necessarily covered in the course.
Liked the pre-arrival questions about what people knew, were doing, and wanted from the course.
The examples were good.
So were the donuts.

Bad

Three weeks is too long.
Some of the later topics were not as useful.
Would have preferred to use standard libraries for the image processing lecture and exercises instead of simplified libraries.
Too little coverage of too many subjects.
The formatting of the slides leaves much to be desired.
Too many lectures ran over time (which was particularly hard in afternoon sessions).
Divided attention in FriendFeed is a problem.
The less applied stuff (e.g., computational complexity) wasn't as useful or as interesting.
Students weren't given enough time to work on their own projects.
Didn't feel encouraged to make suggestions or provide feedback.
Not enough on shell programming.
Too much shell programming.
A/V between Toronto and Edmonton was crude by modern standards.

Changes

More on object-oriented programming.
More feedback on the students' solutions to the exercises—they didn't get the equivalent of grading.
Put the exercises up before the class, so that students know what the lecture's going to be leading them to.

It's been a good three weeks—I enjoyed getting to know the students, and look forward to seeing what they do with what they've learned.

A Good Afternoon

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Yesterday afternoon, the students and ninety other guests were treated to six engaging talks about Science 2.0 from Titus Brown, Cameron Neylon, Victoria Stodden, David Rich, Michael Nielsen, and Jon Udell. We'll post slides and video here as soon as we get them; until then, you can catch up on what happened in the FriendFeed room or by reading Steve Easterbrook's real-time blog of the event.

Our thanks once again to everyone who made the day possible:

Day[-2]

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Today (Thursday) was the second-to-last of the course. It's been a long haul, but we hope a rewarding one. In the morning, the students had an hour-long overview of results from empirical studies of real-world software engineering; in the afternoon, we looked at how traditional and agile development processes are responses to those facts. Tomorrow morning, we'll spend an hour talking about what's gone right and what's gone wrong, then head out for a farewell lunch.

Every Day Is a Big Day...

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

...but today is bigger than most: after lectures yesterday on server-side web programming and building GUIs, students will spend this morning exploring ways to apply what they've learned in the course to their own research problems. This afternoon, we have a stellar line up of speakers from 1:00 to 6:00 pm at the MaRS Centre to talk about how the web is changing the way science is done. We'll post video of the talks as soon as we can, but if you'd like to follow along in real time, we are:

Day 11 and Day 12

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Yesterday (Monday) morning we covered the basics of handling binary data, including bit twiddling and the use of Python's struct module to pack and unpack binary representations of objects. The afternoon was a lightning introduction to how the web works: a simple socket example (just to show students the plumbing) was followed by a description of HTTP's requests and responses, then a look at urllib. Today is going to be devoted to the absolute bare bones of server-side programming, with GUI programming using Tkinter as a follow-up. "Fast paced" doesn't even touch it, but I hope students will come away with an idea of what's possible, and where to look for more information.

Day 10 Done - and With It, Week 2

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

XML in the morning, regular expressions in the afternoon—it's been a long week, but a productive one (I hope). We're going to shuffle some of the material around so that we can do binary data processing, web client and server programming, and GUI programming next week. The highlight, of course, will be the guest speakers on Wednesday afternoon. I hope the students have a restful weekend; I'm looking forward to the last lap.

Day 9

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I meant to write this post yesterday, but we're watching Torchwood: Children of Earth, and, well, you know how it goes. We spent two sessions looking at the basics of SQL and relational databases, which almost every scientist is going to encounter at some point in their career. The morning exercises were obviously too easy—students completed them in a little over and hour—but the afternoon seemed to go at the right pace. This morning we're going to look at XML, and this afternoon at text processing with regular expressions.

Day 7: Lots More Objects

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We took a detour from the notes yesterday morning and built some classes to represent matrices. One reason was to show students how to break a problem down into pieces and solve them one by one; another was to introduce the notions of encapsulation, polymorphism, and inheritance. Aran Donohue (one of the TAs here in Toronto) thinks that inheritance is over-taught, and taught too early—he may be right, but it's also hard to avoid, since so many libraries and frameworks (and tutorials, but that's a circular argument) expect familiarity with it.

Day 8: Getting It Right

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This morning's lecture was a high-level look at software testing, with a long-ish detour into exceptions; this afternoon was an introduction to Python's unittest framework, with some handwaving about testing that functions throw the right kinds of exceptions, replacing files and other slow objects with mock equivalents, and how you decide what tests to write first. It felt like it went better than yesterday's lectures on object-oriented programming, which I think left some students a little bewildered. We're spending tomorrow looking at databases, which means I have to brush up on my SQL tonight...

Day 6: Theory and Practice

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We started Week 2 with a morning of theory: Francois Pitt, a senior lecturer in U of T's Computer Science department, gave students a crash course in algorithmic complexity. It's not something they'll use every day (or even every week), but if they ever have a conversation with a computer scientist about making something go faster, the odds are good it'll come up.

Day 5

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Day 5 of the course: Paul Lu gave a lecture on Make in the morning, and students had a chance to work on problems of their choice in the afternoon. Of all the tools we teach in this course, Make is the least satisfying (at least to me): the basic concept is simple, and I wouldn't run a project without some automating repetitive tasks, but Make's syntax and limitations are repellant.

Day 4

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Today was all about the Unix shell: Karen Reid covered a wide range of topics, often using live examples. Some of the students had never used a command-line prompt before, so all of the material was new; others already knew their way around pretty well, but Karen's explanations filled in some gaps and made sense out of what had, for some of them, seemed like arbitrary magic.

Day 3

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Day 3 of the course—we did sets and dictionaries in the morning (glossing over the handwaving in the notes about computational complexity, since Francois Pitt is going to cover that properly later), and then Paul Gries showed students some basic image processing. Students found the morning exercise challenging, but seemed to be getting lots out of it. The visit to the pub this evening was still quite welcome, though :-). Tomorrow, Karen Reid is introducing them to the Unix shell; we'll let you know how it goes.

Day 2

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

After three Python lectures yesterday, we slowed down a bit today and looked at a pair of tools every professional programmer relies on: symbolic debuggers and version control systems. Paul Lu covered the former topic using WingIDE; Ken Bauer covered the latter using the SmartSVN GUI for Subversion. Working in pairs seems to agree with the students, though as is so often the case, installing and configuring tools is often more work than actually using them. We'll look at Python's sets and dictionaries tomorrow morning, then Paul Gries will give a quick introduction to image processing in the afternoon.

Aaaand They're Off!

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We had our first lecture this morning, and the students are working on their first exercises right now in pairs. You can follow progress at http://friendfeed.com/softwarecarpentryjuly2009.

See You Monday!

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We're all set up and ready to roll! We decided in the end not to record audio or video for this set of lectures, but we'll be posting updates to the lecture notes as we go along. I look forward to meeting our students on Monday...

Registration for July 29 Talks is Now Open

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

As part of this summer's run of the course, we have organized an afternoon of public talks from a stellar lineup of speakers. The event is free, but registration is required, and you can now sign up at http://science20.eventbrite.com/. The talks will run 1-6 pm on Wednesday, July 29, and will be followed by a wine and cheese. For details, including speaker bios and abstracts for their talks, see the "Guest Speakers" page.

Topics and Schedule

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A draft schedule for the July 13-31 offering of the course is now available. We'd welcome your feedback: does this order make sense, are there topics we've included that you don't care about, have we left out anything really important (and if so, what should we drop to make room for it), etc.

Note: the draft schedule has been retired. Please see the course outline instead.

Software Carpentry in Edmonton July 13-31

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Registration is now open for students wishing to do Software Carpentry in Edmonton July 13-31. The course will be co-taught with its counterpart in Toronto, though the Edmonton edition is only open to graduate students and post-docs at Alberta institutions. For more information, please see the full announcement.

Topics and Schedule Posted

Wed, 06 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We've put up a list of the topics we intend to cover, and the order in which we intend to cover them. It's very provisional; we'll update it regularly, and your comments would be very welcome.

Note: the topics page has been retired. Please see the course outline instead.

Entrance Requirements

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Our rough guide to what students should know before taking this course is now on the prerequisites page. If you don't feel confident you know this material, but still want to take the course in July, please let us know: we're organizing some tutorial sessions in May and June.

Note: the prerequisites page has been retired. Please see the target audience page instead.

Software Carpentry in Alberta

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I'm very pleased to announce that thanks to generous support from Cybera, Software Carpentry will be offered at the University of Alberta in Edmonton this summer. The course will be co-taught with the offering at the University of Toronto from July 13 to 31. For more information, or to enrol, please contact Professor Paul Lu.

We've Started a FAQ

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We have started a FAQ [no longer online] for the July 2009 offerings of the course in Edmonton and Toronto. Please let us know if you have any questions that it doesn't answer yet.