Software Carpentry Week in Review: April 7-13, 2014

Mozilla

What’s happening this week

We will have our busiest week ever! Between Monday and Tuesday, almost 350 people will participate in one of our 6 events. Big, big thanks to our 14 instructors, 20 helpers, and 7 sponsors!

  • At PyCon 2014, we have 150 students, 7 instructors, and 6 helpers, plus Titus Brown and Ramnath Vaidyanathan teaching two master classes. We scheduled:
    • our two-day regular workshop,
    • a two-day librarian workshop,
    • “Learn to Teach” workshop, on Monday,
    • “Next-Generation Sequencing” Master Class with Titus Brown, and
    • “R for Python Programmers” Master Class with Ramnath Vaidyanathan.

The PyCon events are sponsored by Enthought.

  • At Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, we have 137 students, 7 instructors, and 20 helpers. All participants, including instructors and helpers, are women.

The Berkeley event is sponsored by NumFocus, Rackspace, GitHub, Monsanto, and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which provides the space for the workshop.

Workshops

We had two workshops last week:

  • Edmund Hart and Camille Avestruz taught a workshop at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
  • Aleksandra Pawlik and Christina Koch taught a workshop at Warwick University, in the UK.

Upcoming workshops

  • April, 23: University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway,
  • April, 29: George Washington University, Ashburn, VA,
  • May, 12: Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbour, NY,
  • May, 19: Science for Life Laboratory, Solna, Sweden.

Lesson development

3 pull requests were merged, no issues were closed, and 2 issues were opened. In addition to the merges, we had 31 commits made by Raniere Silva, Greg Wilson, Brian Miles, Rob Beagrie, Ethan White, Josh Herr, Konrad Hinsen, Marianne Corvellec, and Dani Traphagen.

Other news

  • Greg Wilson followed up on the blog on a discussion on our main repo on which writing tools we should teach, and how some online editors are advancing scientific writing.
  • Greg gave a talk at PyCon 2014 about the lessons learned along the life of Software Carpentry. If you missed it, don’t worry: the video is already on the PyCon 2014 site.

A workshop needs you

  • US and Canada
    • If you’re close to North Carolina, they need an instructor for a workshop at Duke University in June. A workshop in San Diego in May needs instructors and helpers. A lot of instructors are needed in the West Coast: four at the University of California at Davis, four in total for two workshops in Stanford, and another four in Portland. In the East Coast, a workshop at the University of Delaware needs instructors. Helpers are needed for Vancouver in Canada and Atlanta in Georgia.
  • Europe and Middle East
    • The double workshop, first in Cyprus and one week later in Jordan, needs one european instructor who gets hotel stays covered for the week in-between. In addition, at least one instructor is needed for a workshop in Kiel, Germany, and several for workshops in Cranfield, Nottingham, and Oxford in the UK.
  • Oceania
    • A workshop in Brisbane, Australia, right before PyCon Australia, needs helpers.

More details in the instructor-needed Etherpad.