Our two-day workshop at the University of Alberta wound up a couple of hours ago. We had quite a few no-shows this time (which was annoying, given how many people were waitlisted), but those who did come seemed to get a lot out of it:
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Many thanks to Rose, Neil, and Paul for making it possible.
We have just added another workshop to the summer’s list, this one at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on July 16-17. Please let friends and colleagues know—I look forward to meeting them.
We’re pleased to announce that we will be running a two-day boot camp at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore on June 18-19, 2012. We only have space for 20 participants, so please register early.
Our workshop at Michigan State University this week was three days long instead of two, and included two topics (Git and the IPython notebook) that we haven’t tried before. Feedback was generally positive, but we’ve got lots to work on for next time as well.
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We are pleased to announce that we will be running a boot camp on July 9 and 10 in Boston—please see its page for details (some of which we’re still working out). We have room for 40 participants, so please register early. (And if you can, register with friends: we are finding that people get a lot more out of this training if they’re learning with their labmates and other collaborators.)
For the boot camp at UCL, we tried using Mercurial (with EasyMercurial) instead of Subversion in the version control segment.
You can see the plan for the segment on this EasyMercurial project page. Briefly, we opened with a few plain slides about the purpose of version control, followed by a hands-on example in three parts (working by yourself, working by yourself with an online remote repository, and working with others). We started at the beginning and got as far as “hg bisect”, but did not cover branching.
I was presenting the segment, so I’m not well placed to judge how effective it was as a learning experience. But I did make some notes.
We’ve come to the end of a hot, slightly sweaty, two days of learning in UCL and have just done a straw poll of participants of the good and bad points of this bootcamp. Something that was trialled at UCL was asking participants to sign up in small (3-4 people) teams drawn from their local research group. In total, we had a little over 40 learners and 10 helpers. We also taught the version control portion using EasyMercurial (thanks to Chris Cannam from SoundSoftware).
Here’s what we learned…
I’m sitting in a packed room helping out at the UCL bootcamp, the first of a series to be run in the United Kingdom (Newcastle is next, and there are plans to run additional workshops in Oxford, RAL, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bristol). I’m thinking about two things: why would you design a 60 seater lecture theatre with only one window for ventilation and why is Software Carpentry so popular in the UK?
Do you know someone who’d be helped by a Software Carpentry boot camp? Or can you introduce us to someone who’d help us organize one in a new venue? If so, please introduce us: we’d like to start planning for the fall, and we’re always keen to make new friends.
Our boot camp at Utah State University finished earlier today—many thanks once again to Ethan White and his friends for hosting us. Here’s what the students thought:
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Next stop: London!