#swcarpentry

We've been running Software Carpentry workshops since November 2013 and are constantly blown away by how popular they are. So when the Software Carpentry Foundation announced that it was looking for institutional Partners and Affiliates, we knew the time was right to take our relationship to the next level. (Was that too much? We're just very excited!)

@ResPlat Remember this? A great panorama shot from our first ever @swcarpentry workshop. #Flashback #ResBaz pic.twitter.com/EAndyHLTd4

— Damien Irving (@DrClimate)

February 2, 2015

We are therefore very pleased to announce that we have officially joined the rapidly growling list of institutional Affiliates of the Software Carpentry Foundation.  

As part of the agreement, we will continue to contribute to Software Carpentry in a number of ways. Isabell Kiral-Kornek, Scott Ritchie and Kerry Halupka will continue their great work on the MATLAB, R and web programming lesson materials, Fiona Tweedie and Yuandra Ismiraldi will continue working on new lesson materials for the humanities and social sciences, Damien Irving will continue his role as the unofficial coordinator of Software Carpentry activities across Australia, and we will continue to to run and support workshops both at the University of Melbourne and also across Melbourne and Australia more broadly.

By Damien Irving.

This time last year we introduced you to the team of geophysicists behind Underworld, which is a computer model that simulates the movement of continents (i.e. plate tectonics). Every year Masters students in the School of Earth Sciences are required to take a number of one-week courses offered by the Victorian Institute of Earth and Planetary Sciences (VIEPS), so Professor Moresi and his team offered an Underworld VIEPS course for the first time in 2014. Their model has a Python front-end, so we offered to help out by delivering a half-day introduction to Python at the beginning of the week.

These geologists are rocking the @swcarpentry shell lessons! #punintended @ResPlat pic.twitter.com/nGvdyoINfv

— Damien Irving (@DrClimate) May 25, 2015

Upon reviewing the 2014 course, Professor Moresi found that in order to use the Underworld model more effectively, his students would require a stronger grounding in the fundamentals of Python programming. To address this issue, an “Introduction to Python” course was added to the VIEPS schedule for 2015. We helped out by running the first two days of that course as a regular Software Carpentry workshop, and then for the remainder of the week the students applied their newly acquired Software Carpentry skills to typical Earth Sciences problems (e.g. analysing and plotting seismic data). This introductory course was set as a prerequisite for the Underworld VIEPS course, which was held two weeks later.

Recipe: Take @EarthSciMelb Masters students, add @swcarpentry + lessons on #iris & #cartopy, get awesome #dataviz pic.twitter.com/s0r09TQEN1

— Damien Irving (@DrClimate) June 16, 2015

By Damien Irving.

One of the major goals of the ResBaz movement is to facilitate the formation of self-sufficient communities around common digital research tools. It would be impossible for a single institution to provide a help desk for the myriad of different tools and software libraries out there, so instead we want to help researchers get together and help themselves. We want all the astronomers to get together and help each other with AstroPy (a popular Python library), all the humanities and social scientists to get together and help each other with NLTK, all the people from lots of different disciplines who have a common interest in mapping to help each other with CartoDB and TileMill, etc, etc. With that goal in mind, the Software Carpentry workshop hosted by COMBINE (a student-run organisation for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics) last week was a major milestone.     

Day 1 of @combine_au @swcarpentry workshop well under way. 40 students, morning on the Unix shell with @LonsBio, now onto Git with @0x7472

— COMBINE (@combine_au)

April 8, 2015

The origins of the COMBINE workshop go back to November 2013, at the first ever ResBaz Software Carpentry workshop. A few students from the COMBINE community came to that event and liked what they saw, so we got chatting and agreed to co-host a couple of workshops in 2014 (see here and here). Myself and Scott Ritchie did most of the teaching at those workshops, while COMBINE did all the advertising and provided most of the helpers. Inspired by our teaching prowess (or perhaps sick of listening to us and thinking they could do a better job!), a bunch of those helpers came along to our Software Carpentry instructor training course in February 2015. As newly accredited instructors, they then got together and hosted the workshop last week without any assistance from us whatsoever.

@TomSilico teaching fundamental matplotlib and numpy at @swcarpentry unimelb, hosted @combine_au! pic.twitter.com/qogjIDPTIZ

— Kian Ho (@kianho1)

April 10, 2015

By Damien Irving.

Given the global success of Software Carpentry (10,000+ learners and counting), it's easy to forget that the first two-day workshops were held only three short years ago. Excited by the potential of the project in those early days, Josh Madin (Macquarie University) and myself (University of Melbourne) pooled our funds and got Greg Wilson (Co-Founder and Executive Director of Software Carpentry) out to Australia to run the first ever workshops outside of Europe and North America. Since those initial Sydney and Melbourne workshops in February 2013, an additional 15 have been held around Australia and New Zealand and there are a dozen or so active local instructors. 

We're here at @swcarpentry instructor training at @unimelb getting ready for #ResBaz! pic.twitter.com/jsH8Uj0EAl

— Research Bazaar (@ResBaz)

February 11, 2015

While 17 workshops and 12 instructors is fairly good progress, here at Research Bazaar HQ we've been blown away by the popularity of Software Carpentry and are determined to see it take off in this part of the world. As such, we just hosted the first live (i.e. in person as opposed to online) Software Carpentry instructor training event in Australia, as a curtain raiser to our inaugural Research Bazaar conference (a HUGE thanks to Bill Mills for coming down to Melbourne to teach the workshop). Fifty trainees from all corners of Australia and New Zealand attended, and by the end of the training there was already a number of workshops in the pipeline for 2015:

NeSI is hosting workshops in Auckland and Christchurch later this month, and both NeSI and the University of Otago are looking to support activities in New Zealand going forward

A large pool of instructors in New South Wales is looking to run 3-4 workshops this year, with support from Intersect

A large pool of instructors in Brisbane is looking to run a number of workshops this year, and the AMOS conference workshop will also be held at the University of Queensland in July

Data Science Hobart is looking to innovate on the traditional two-day format by teaching a short segment of the lesson materials each week at their weekly (1-2 hour) meetups

Curtin University looks set to host the first ever workshop in Perth

COMBINE are planning to host two workshops around the country specifically for the bioinformatics community

RMIT, Swinburne, and the University of Melbourne are all looking to host workshops in Melbourne, with the latter branching out to try Data Carpentry and workshops for the digital humanities

Many of these groups are also considering running workshops as part of the multi-city ResBaz 2016 conference

Introducing the newest bunch of @swcarpentry trainers! See you at #ResBazes in your cities! @ResBaz pic.twitter.com/dpoLwKSUD5

— Research Platforms (@ResPlat)

February 13, 2015