To help you keep on top of Software Carpentry news, one of our contributors and instructors, Aron Ahmadia, has been pulling together weekly summaries for us, posting them here on the blog. Aron’s now passing that torch to one of our other contributors, Ivan Gonzalez, a physicist living in Boston and a member of the Software Carpentry community. Please help me in thanking Aron for his help over the last few months, and welcome Ivan.

Now on with Ivan’s post …

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There two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the discovery of the simple physical laws which underlie the complex phenomena of nature. — C.A.R. Hoare

What’s happening next week

There will be a Mozilla Science Lab community call this Thursday, February 13th, at 11 ET. This is open to the public, and you can find the details here.

Lesson Development

Ethan White’s second intermediate Python lesson, which uses a Pandas-oriented data analysis notebook to introduce concepts of modularization, documentation, and testing, is now merged into the master branch.

Randy Olson’s improvements to Joshua Adelman’s spatial analysis tutorial were also merged this week.

There was a new release candidate for our novice teaching materials, with plans to make them into a book. Thanks to all that have contributed.

Instructor Training

Round 7 of instructor training wrapped up this week. Let’s give a warm welcome to our new instructors! There are more details
available on the training blog.

Also, this is a reminder that registration is still open for a live 3-day instructor training April 28–30 in Toronto.

Workshops

Aleksandra Pawlik and Rob Davey just wrapped up a two-day Python-themed workshop at The Genome Analysis Center in Norwich starting February 3rd. Their material repository is here.

Other News

• Greg Wilson has proposed a new page in the blog compiling concrete examples of science made following the guidelines that Software Carpentry advocates for. Contact him if you want to showcase a piece of your research.
• Justin Kitzes is now maintaining a Wiki page for troubleshooting common installation and run-time issues for the software we teach with. Please stop by to review and contribute.

Please send bootcamp reports, questions, suggestions for quotes, and other updates to igonzalez@mailaps.org.