Blog

CarpentryCon2018

Published on June 27, 2018.

By Raniere Silva, Software Sustainability Institute, Aleksandra Nenadic, Software Sustainability Institute, Mario Antonioletti, Software Sustainability Institute.

Software Carpentry "restarted once again in January 2012 with a new grant from the Sloan Foundation, and backing from the Mozilla Foundation" [1]. Soon after, the Software Sustainability Institute launched the Software Carpentry movement in the UK by organising and staffing the first workshops together with Greg Wilson [3, 4].  Since then, the Institute has been The Carpentries’ Platinum partner and has provided help to The Carpentries movement by funding a workshop administrator position to coordinate workshops in the UK and Europe. The Institute's staff regularly teach at workshops and have been actively promoting The Carpentries' programmes to educational institutions around the UK. Throughout this time, we have witnessed and supported the UK and worldwide expansion of the Carpentries’ community and the rise of a number of new Carpentries (Data, Library, HPC, Social Sciences, Digital Humanities, etc.). In the UK alone, there are now 15 institutions that have their own relationships with The Carpentries and are actively running Carpentries programmes. After six years of working and communicating with The Carpentries’ staff and community via email and various video conferencing tools at all sorts of early or late hours, we finally met them face-to-face for the very first time at CarpentryCon 2018. It was all very exciting!

Measuring Behaviour 2018

Published on June 22, 2018.

We know that seven out of ten UK researchers reported that their work would be impossible without software, but, sometimes when attending domain specific conferences, we still get surprised at the importance of software in research. On June 2018, I attended Measuring Behavior 2018 by invitation of our fellow Robyn Grant.

Measuring Behavior 2018 was a three-day conference hosted at the Manchester Metropolitan University and covered analysis methods for behavioral data, techniques for human factors studies, mazes and behavioral tests, sensors for measuring behavior, extracting behavior from audio-video streams and a few other related topics.

CarpentryCon2018

Published on June 4, 2018.

Last week, I went to Dublin for the first ever CarpentryCon organised by The Carpentries, formely know as Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry.

I got involved with Software Carpentry for the first time in 2013 when the Mozilla Science Lab was announced. The announcement says

Digital literacy for scientists

Kaitlin is joined by Greg Wilson, the founder of Software Carpentry, a program that teaches basic computing skills to researchers to help them become more productive. Over the past year, Software Carpentry has run over 70 workshops for more than 2200 attendees, and is on track to double those numbers over the next 12 months. As part of the Mozilla Science Lab, Software Carpentry will explore what “digital literacy” means for scientific researchers and how these digital skills can further aid their work.

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Spreadsheets: Headers

Published on April 18, 2018.

During my undergraduate, I barely used any spreadsheet software. One of my friends told me that spreadsheet software helped to turn the personal computer popular and Wikipedia can confirm it:

VisiCalc was the first electronic spreadsheet on a microcomputer,[9] and it helped turn the Apple II computer into a popular and widely used system.

Why I didn’t used spreadsheet? That’s a good question. Probably because I was more interested in learn Python. In the last two years, I spent a lot of time with spreadsheet software in front of me and I collected a long list of things that I hated in Microsoft Office Excel, LibreOffice Calc and Google Sheet. This is the first post of a serie covering my list.

National Coding Week: Full Stack of Pancakes

Published on September 19, 2017.

My friend Niall Beard recommended me to Sophie Ashcroft as a Git instructor for the National Coding Week activity that Sophie is organising with other members of Full Stack of Pancakes. After exchanged a few emails, the information that I have to try to plan the lesson was

• 2 hours long
• basic level
• mix of backgrounds
• focus on motivation

It is going to be a challenge and based on some of my previous experience teaching Git, the motivation part is very hard if you work with just one file or with isolated files, i.e. that don’t interact with any other. Over dinner, I was thinking of what game I could implemente in Liquid template language in less than 2 hours that could be interesting for learners to get motivated to learn Git. The solution, at the moment, is a Rock Paper Scissors game. If you look at the Git repository, it only has