University of California - Berkeley on The Carpentries

A Workshop for Undergraduates at UC Berkeley

Thu, 06 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We ran a workshop for undergraduates at UC Berkeley on July 9-10, 2015. This was a quickly planned workshop from concept to completion (~19 days). I was excited to run a workshop geared towards undergraduates, especially those involved in research projects in the summertime.

Workshops at the Data Science Centers

Thu, 30 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are pleased to announce that we will be running workshops simultaneously at the data science centers at UC Berkeley, New York University, and the University of Washington on March 17-18, 2014. These workshops will introduce participants to the skills they should master before they tackle anything with "cloud" or "peta" in its name, including task automation, version control, modular programming, and structured data management. Novice and intermediate learners alike are welcome; for more information on topics and other details, please mail us or check out the registration pages for the three sites:

Feedback from UC Berkeley

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last weekend we held a bootcamp at the University of California, Berkeley, that was targeted for environmental scientists and ecologists. We had a great group of attendees (31 registered, 28 at start, and 24 at end) and instructors/helpers, and, as a major bonus, had no major technical or logistical emergencies to deal with (but see below for some minor ones).

Before the workshop, we had participants fill out a brief pre-workshop survey that we set up on Google Drive. The idea was to gather some initial impressions that would help us tailor the workshop content. We learned a few particularly useful tidbits from this exercise. First, about half the attendees had tried Python before and half had never used it. Second, nearly a third had used some form of version control before (big surprise), and half of these had used Git. Third, the most requested topics, by far, were related to importing and manipulating different types of data and to integrating Python with R and/or ArcGIS.

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 UC Berkeley

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We just finished up our UC Berkeley bootcamp with me, Katy Huff, and Justin Kitzes teaching. Here's the feedback:

Good	Bad
first day good with no programming experience	couldn't run the VM on underpowered computer
good general intro to basics of Python and VC	don't see why Python is better than R
liked the intro/advanced Python split	would like a longer bootcamp with more focus on Python
good git introduction	didn't want to learn Python
IPython notebook helped me learn	would like to give anonymous feedback
got to see real software engineering	didn't catch some important details that held things up
good coverage of Python + software engineering	have better setup instructions, test scripts
wanted to learn Python	Python instruction was too slow/basic
liked simple examples	got left behind sometimes
IPython/shell interaction awesome	not sure how to integrate git into workflow, have practical demos, case studies
good job squeezing a lot of content in	hard to type/listen/watch all at once
introduced scientific Python	would be nice to have a data cleaning example, workflow example
liked the showcase demos of matplotlib/IPython features	could have sped up introductory topics
combination of topics was good	have more content summaries, workflow visualizations
liked intro Python exercises	reading suggestions to follow up bootcamp
understand the basics of version control	wanted to see object oriented programming/calling C code

Unfortunately I missed a pre-workshop memo that most of the attendees would be experienced R users and I could have sped up/skipped some of the introductory programming material in favor of more scientific Python. The second day material on version control and software engineering still seemed to hit home, though, so we didn't totally waste their time. In future workshops I'll try to do a better job getting attendee profiles beforehand.

That Was Quick

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Registration for our October 2012 workshop at UC Berkeley opened mid-afternoon yesterday. We were sold out and putting people on the waitlist in less than four hours.