The Third Bit

It’s been a busy week over at Software Carpentry:

• Screencasts With Point-Form Notes
• Mini-Screencasts
• Exercises (with a screencast)
• A Word (or Three) From Our Sponsors
• Our first Programming Screencast
• Why Most Scientists Don’t Like Computers (I think most programmers don’t either)
• Closed Captioning
• Slides
• We’ll Know We’ve Succeeded If… (a link to Titus Brown’s mock data management plan)
• Evaluating Methods and Protocols

Our current schedule calls for us to have the database, spreadsheet, and version control lectures online by the end of next week. It’s ambitious (particularly given my continuing predilection for procrastination), but I think we have a good chance. If anyone wants to do some freelance graphic design, please let me know…

Software Carpentry

Over on the Software Carpentry blog, I’ve posted links to three trial screencasts. We’d be grateful for your comments: do you like the format? Is the video quality good enough?  Are the transcript and/or notes useful?  Other than adding exercises (which we’re going to try tomorrow and Wednesday), what could we do to make them better?

And while we’re on the subject, what are you favorite technical/training videos? Do you like the PowerPoint slides with inset talking heads of Google Tech Talks?  Or do you prefer screen recordings with voiceover, like this?  How about Common Craft‘s mix of cartoons and stop-motion film?

Software Carpentry

The Software Carpentry blog has moved to http://software-carpentry.org/blog/ — please remove the old softwarecarpentry.wordpress.com entry from your blog reader and follow our progress at the new address. Full-time work starts May 1!

Announcements, Software Carpentry

From the last week and a half:

• Other online courses that Software Carpentry could imitate.
• Feedback on the recently-completed course, with a discussion of how much or how little Software Carpentry should try to accomplish.
• An announcement of Hans-Martin von Gaudecker’s course on computational skills for economists this fall at Universität Mannheim.
• Some discussion about platforms for delivering the course.

Lots of decisions to make in not very much time—as always, feedback and input would be appreciated.

Software Carpentry

Now that Software Carpentry Version 4 is a go, I’ve moved most blogging about scientific software development over to http://softwarecarpentry.wordpress.com. Recent highlights include:

1. You can now follow Software Carpentry’s progress on Twitter as @swcarpentry.
2. I’m helping teach a course on analyzing next-generation sequencing data at Michigan State University at the end of May.
3. Some thoughts on online course delivery.
4. Some more thoughts on instructional design. (These two posts are mostly actually pleas for help.)
5. The announcement that the course bibliography is online.
6. A discussion of what’s missing from that bibliography.
7. My analysis of the pros and cons of various formats for the course material. Much to my own surprise, LaTeX is the frontrunner…

Software Carpentry

I am very excited to announce that I am going to work full-time on revising the Software Carpentry course from May 2010 to May 2011. Please see the full announcement for details.

Announcements, Software Carpentry

Titus Brown and I are running a course May 31-June 11 in Michigan — for details, please see the course web site or my Software Carpentry post.

Announcements, Software Carpentry, Teaching

It’s a sunny Sunday morning in Atlanta, and I’m on my way home. I came down Thursday to:

1. Raise money for Software Carpentry.
2. Get people excited about Basie.
3. Get people excited about UCOSP.
4. Talk with Georgia Tech‘s Mark Guzdial about computer science education.

#4 actually happened first. Mark picked me up Friday morning; we chatted for a while, then I spent an hour with some other faculty before giving my evidence-based software engineering talk. It was fun, and I came away from my discussion with Mark with half a dozen leads to follow up.

#1 is most important to me personally—I really want to spend a year upgrading the course after I leave U of T at the end of this term—but I didn’t have much luck. The people I spoke to were sympathetic, but it’s been a hard 18 months for everyone financially, and there are a lot of other good causes clamoring for attention.

I put less time into #2 than I probably should have, but still got some good feedback (which I’ve posted on the Basie blog). Long story short, if we can make Basie faster and provide a Trac-to-Basie migration tool, our prospects are good.

I wasn’t thinking of #3 (UCOSP) when I proposed my talk, but it’s what people were most interested in. Several students and professors said that they would like to be involved; the trick now is to find money to hire a half-time admin to take care of fundraising and organization.  If you have $35K you can spare, please let me know. (And my slides are up if you’re interested.)

The best part of the trip? Talking to people I’ve only ever met electronically, or haven’t seen since my last PyCon eight years ago. Some of the discussion was about programming, but not a lot (since I don’t actually program any more). Mostly it was about kids, careers, and the meaning of life—all the catching up you do with people that you really wish you got to see more often.

It’s a sunny Sunday morning in Atlanta, and I’m on my way home…

Later: video of my lightning talk on Friday evening about yet another collaborative O’Reilly book (this one on software architecture) is available at blip.tv — check about 9 minutes in.

Basie, Python, Software Carpentry

As some of you already know, my contract with the University of Toronto runs out this spring, and I have decided not to seek renewal. I’ve learned a lot in this job, and had a chance to work with some great people, but it’s time for new challenges.

What I’d most like to do next is spend a year working full-time on the Software Carpentry course—of all the things I’ve done, it’s the one that I think has the most potential to make scientists’ lives better. My goal is to raise approximately CDN$25,000 from each of half a dozen sponsors so that I can reorganize and revamp the content, add screencasts and video lectures, and generally drag it into the 21st Century. An abbreviated proposal is included below the cut—if you or anyone you know would be interested in discussing possibilities, please give me a shout.

Read more…

Software Carpentry

I’d like to start playing the sax again. I’d also like to get to the gym a couple of times a week, and write some more children’s books, and tear up the paving stones in our front yard so that we can put in a garden, but you probably don’t care much about that. If you’re reading this blog, though, I hope you will care enough about what I hope to do after I’m done at the University of Toronto to help me make it happen. Funding would be nice, as would pointers to potential sources of funding, but what I need most at this point is a reality check—your thoughts and comments would be very welcome.

So: I’m involved in a lot of things right now, but the three that matter most to me are (in order):

1. Software Carpentry, a crash course in software development for scientists and engineers;
2. Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects, which gives students from universities in Canada and the US a chance to work in distributed teams on term-long software engineering projects; and
3. a collection of essays on evidence-based software engineering that will be published by O’Reilly in 2010.

The second and third are unlikely to turn into full-time jobs, and I’m not even sure I want them to. At this point in my life, what I really want is to make a difference to the world my daughter will inherit, and I think my best shot of doing that is to help scientists do more research with less effort. As I’ve argued many times, teaching them basic software development skills will have more impact than any amount of petascale this or parallel that. The problem is finding someone to fund me for 12 months while I upgrade the existing course so that it can be used for self-paced study over the web. I have a plan; all I need (for some value of “all”) is half a dozen donors willing to kick in $20-25K each to cover salary, travel, video production, and what-not.

I’ve given up on getting government funding through conventional channels (I’m 0 for 5 on applications), and unfortunately, most companies doing the computational side of computational science are only interested in backing showcase “big iron” stuff (because hey, it makes sense to ask scientists to parallelize code before they even know how to modularize or test it). With 139 days on the clock as I write this, I’m open to (practical) suggestions…

Software Carpentry