What’s happening this week

We will have an online lab meeting for Software Carpentry this Thursday (April 24) at 10:00 and 19:00 Eastern time. Feel free to add items to the agenda using the Lab Meeting Etherpad. Connection details will be posted there on Thursday.

Also, we’ll be running two sessions of office hours this Thursday (April 24) for our “Code as a research object” project. Have questions about how to get a DOI for your code? Want to better understand the technology behind the project? Join us at 11:00 and 16:00 Eastern time. Etherpad and call details can be found here and here.

Workshops

Last week, almost 350 people participated in one of our 6 events, involving 14 instructors, 20 helpers, and 7 sponsors.

• At PyCon 2014 in Montreal, we had 150 students, 7 instructors, and 6 helpers, plus Titus Brown and Ramnath Vaidyanathan teaching two master classes. All these events were sponsored by Enthought. We had:
  • our two-day regular workshop,
  • a two-day workshop for librarians,
  • “How to Teach Programming”,
  • “Next-Generation Sequencing”, Master Class with Titus Brown, and
  • “R for Python Programmers”, Master Class with Ramnath Vaidyanathan.
• At Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, we have 137 students, 7 instructors, and 20 helpers. All participants, including instructors and helpers, are women and three different tracks: novice, intermediate, and advanced were offered. This event was sponsored by NumFocus, Rackspace, GitHub, Monsanto, and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which provided the space for the workshop.

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, 12: Universidade Federal do Rio Grande, Rio Grande, Brazil.
• May, 19: Science for Life Laboratory, Solna, Sweden.

Lesson development

11 pull requests were merged, seven issues were closed, and 5 issues were opened. In addition to the merges, we had 31 commits made by Raniere Silva, Greg Wilson, Andrea Zonca, Gavin Simpson, Stephen Turner, Doug Latornell, Ivan Savov, and Trevor W. King.

Other news

• A few weeks ago, our instructors were asked to fill out a survey about their skills and at which levels they feel comfortable teaching them. You can find the results posted in our blog.
• We are retiring Software Carpentry’s IRC channel and moving on to the Mozilla Science Lab’s on. Everybody is welcome to join the conversations there.
• Steven Koenig made a nice recap on the workshop he taught a couple of weeks ago at the University of Southern Denmark.
• Applications are now open for the 2014 Computational Summer Institute at the National Socio-Environment Synthesis Center. Teams of researchers are invited to apply for spaces at the one-week institute which offers hands-on training in managing the lifecycle of code and data.

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, and 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.