… The 3am realization is that many, many “introduction” to programming materials start at the 1→10 transition. But learners start at the 0→1 transition—and a 10-line program has the approachability of Everest at that point. – Andromeda Yelton

Important Announcements

We’ve identified a bug in the current version of Git for Windows that will prevent users from using HTTPS. We are revising installation and setup instructions to avoid this, but if you are running a bootcamp this week, here are two options:

• Have the students install the 1.8.4 Git for Windows release over the broken installation.
• Switch students to SSH-based authentication

See this issue report for more information.

Bootcamps

January is a very busy month for Software Carpentry. This week alone saw 5 bootcamps across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

• 13-14 Will Trimble, Paul Wilson, Matt Gidden, Lauren Michael, Cliff Davis, Danielle Nielsen, and Aronne Merrelli taught a Python-based bootcamp at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Lesson materials.
• 13-14 Patrick Fuller, Ivan Gonzalez, and Jeff Hollister taught an R-based bootcamp at the Coastal Institute, University of Rhode Island. Lesson materials.
• 13-14 Andromeda Yelton, Greg Wilson, Victor Ng, and Chris Gray taught a Python-based bootcamp for librarians at Mozilla in Toronto. Lesson materials.
• 14-15 Software Sustainability Institute Fellow Mike Croucher, MathWorks employees Jos Martin, Ken Deeley, and Juan Martinez, and Shoaib Sufi and Aleksandra Pawlik taught a MATLAB-themed bootcamp at the University of Manchester. Lesson materials.
• 18-19 Justin Kitzes, Chris Holdgraf, and Mark Wilber taught a Python-based weekend bootcamp at the University of California – Berkeley. In addition to their beautiful bootcamp site page, they made excellent use of their EtherPad for answering questions, feedback, and follow-up discussion. Lesson materials.

Lesson Material

This past week saw contributions from 8 authors, with 21 commits, 7 files changed, and 1523 new lines of content in our lesson material repository on GitHub. That may sound like a lot, but when tracking Git commits, it is good to keep in mind that a picture is frequently counted as a hundred lines.

• @ethanwhite merged the first lesson of his Python introduction into master. Thanks to @wking, @r-gaia-cs, @jdblischak, @gvwilson, and @BernhardKonrad for their reviews and suggestions. @ahmadia and @randyolson will be testing this lesson at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center bootcamp this week.
• @tbekolay added a new section on testing and debugging in the novice notebook on Creating Functions. You can see the results here.
• @dmj111 added a small aside on the use of .gitignore files in the novice lesson on A Better Kind of Backup. Here’s the revised lesson.
• @lexnederbragt updated several lessons to refactor out deprecated “from pylab import *” statements.
• @r-gaia-cs noted that student-made Git commits will have different ids than the instruction material, and contributed a fix.

Blog

• Greg Wilson explained why Software Carpentry is not run as a MOOC.
• Aleksandra Pawlik wrote an in-depth report on the first Software Carpentry R bootcamp at Cambridge University. The bootcamp was also reported on by this article from the Software Sustainability Institute.
• Ivan Gonzalez also wrote a detailed report on the the Software Carpentry bootcamp at the Coastal Institute. Here are his two pieces of advice from teaching this bootcamp:
  • If you advocate version control for science and not only for code, be ready to have an argument about why not using Word.
  • Take as much time as you can for documentation and testing, even with novices.

• Michael Hansen wrote an introduction to the image_novice module he developed with Greg Wilson, Tony Yu, and Stefan van der Walt. The image_novice module helps bring programming to life with immediate visual feedback at an interactive IPython console or notebook, and is a great way to introduce beginners to programming concepts.
• Our blog also hosted some feedback from Greg Wilson and Chris Gray on Andromeda Yelton’s great blog post about her teaching experiences at the bootcamp for librarians in Toronto.
• Greg Wilson announced a second pilot study of code review for scientific software, starting in February 2014.
• Finally, Greg Wilson posted a summary of this past month’s discussion on what to teach about writing and publishing paper in a webby world. If you didn’t get a chance to participate, this is a great opportunity to catch up.

Have a good week!