The Third Bit

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

I have updated the description of how I plan/hope to reorganize the Software Carpentry course.  My thanks to everyone who commented on the earlier draft; I’d be very grateful for feedback on this one as well—I realize that some of the lectures are still hopelessly ambitious, but I hope it’s at least a target to shoot at. Please post comments on the Software Carpentry blog post.

Software Carpentry

Someone once said, “Never set yourself achievable goals.” I’m willing to bet he died a lonely, bitter man, and I have no desire to follow in his footsteps. However, I do have to figure out what the Software Carpentry course should try to teach scientists about programming for the web. I have to teach something: getting data from the web, and making data and useful programs accessible to others, is high on everyone’s wish list, and crucial to being a more effective scientist.

But even basic web programming would be a course unto itself. At best, there’s room in Software Carpentry for two hours of lecture and four hours of practical work. Students will be comfortable with strings, lists, loops, conditionals, and functions; they will have just met regular expressions, XML, and databases, and their grasp of these topics will still be pretty shaky. It’s hard to cover even simple CGI programming with those constraints, and morally questionable as well—there are just too many ways they could leave their machines open to compromise.

I’m tempted to introduce them to an RSS-based mashup tool like Yahoo! Pipes, but (a) it’s closed-source and proprietary (which means it could disappear at any moment, like FuseCal and so many others), (b) getting data from your own machine requires exactly those skills we don’t have time to include in the two hours (or a friendly sys admin with time on her hands). Is there an open source tool that does similar things? It’d have to be much (much, much) lighter weight than scientific workflow tools like Taverna, allow users to mix local and remote data/processing/services, and be nearly trivial to extend.  Any pointers?  Or is anyone interested in helping write such a beast?

Software Carpentry

I’ve posted a note on the Software Carpentry blog describing how I plan to rewrite the course, and asking for help with some outstanding issues.  Your input would be very welcome.

Software Carpentry, Teaching

Mostly driven by my dream of updating the Software Carpentry course (you can follow my progress, such as it is, on the blog). Now, would someone please write “GIS with Python”?

• Web Application Design Patterns
• Python: Visual QuickStart Guide
• Bioinformatics Programming Using Python
• Web 2.0 Architectures: What entrepreneurs and information architects need to know
• Web Security Testing Cookbook: Systematic Techniques to Find Problems Fast
• Python for Unix and Linux System Administration
• Natural Language Processing with Python
• Universal Design for Web Applications
• High Performance Python
• Bridging the Communication Gap: Specification by Example and Agile Acceptance Testing
• Joe Celko’s Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smarties

Books, Software Carpentry

American Scientist has just published a short article summarizing I wrote summarizing the results from last year’s survey of how scientists actually use computers.

Research, Software Carpentry

Slides from the Science 2.0 symposium held on July 29 as part of the Software Carpentry course are now available online.  Video of the lectures will follow soon.

Software Carpentry

A decade ago, people like Jon Udell were imagining how the web could radically change the way science is done. Today, those visions are becoming a reality, and on July 29, you can join us for an afternoon of talks about what’s happening and how it could touch your life. Full details are at http://softwarecarpentry.wordpress.com/guests/ — the event is free, but you must register in advance (as there is limited seating). Our speakers will include:

• Titus Brown: Choosing Infrastructure and Testing Tools for Scientific Software Projects
• Cameron Neylon: A Web Native Research Record: Applying the Best of the Web to the Lab Notebook
• Michael Nielsen: Doing Science in the Open: How Online Tools are Changing Scientific Discovery
• David Rich: Using “Desktop” Languages for Big Problems
• Victoria Stodden: How Computational Science is Changing the Scientific Method
• Jon Udell: Collaborative Curation of Public Events

We look forward to seeing you there!

Announcements, Software Carpentry