The Third Bit
Start where you are, use what you have, help who you can.
In Brief
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Co-founder of Software Carpentry
and The Architecture of Open Source Applications
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Educator of the Year
Co-winner, Jolt Award, Best General Book
Member, Python Software Foundation
Author or editor of over a dozen books on programming and two for children
Recent Writing
Recent Posts
2021-03-04: Staying Safe Online
2021-02-22: Strategies for Change
2021-02-20: Asteroids and Dinosaurs
2021-02-19: Blinkered Visions
2021-02-15: On Spec
2021-02-12: Last Day at RStudio
2021-02-10: Building a Book
2021-01-27: JoVE But Not For Me
2021-01-27: The Essence of Teaching
2021-01-26: Dead Last
2021-01-25: How I Write a Technical Book
2021-01-23: But Can She Type?
...or follow me on Twitter
Recent Papers
Lin et al (2020): Ten quick tips for making things findable
Nederbragt et al (2020): Ten quick tips for teaching with participatory live coding
Denny et al (2019): Research this! Questions that computing educators most want computing education researchers to answer
Sholler et al (2019): Ten simple rules for helping newcomers become contributors to open projects
Wilson (2019): Ten quick tips for creating an effective lesson
Brown & Wilson (2019): Ten quick tips for teaching programming
Current and Recent Projects
Teaching Tech Together
A book about teaching programming for people with technical backgrounds but no formal training as educators.
JavaScript for Data Science
An introduction to JavaScript for both client-side and server-side programming for data scientists who have never used it before.
Research Software Engineering in Python
A textbook for a semester-long course on building research software and running research software projects. This book is due to be published in the first quarter of 2021.
Software Tools in JavaScript
An attempt to teach software design by re-implementing common software engineering tools in Node.js, it should be ready for use some time in 2021.
The Tidynomicon
A brief introduction to R for people who already know how to program in a language like Python.
TidyBlocks
A blocks-based tool for teaching basic data science: think "Scratch meets the tidyverse". TidyBlocks is built in JavaScript using Google's Blockly toolkit.
The Architecture of Open Source Applications
A collection of essays describing the architectures of 50 open source projects of various sizes, many written by those projects' creators.
The Carpentries
A non-profit organization dedicated to teaching basic software and data skills to researchers world-wide. I co-founded its predecessor, Software Carpentry, and was its first Executive Director.
Glosario
A multilingual glossary of terms used in data science and adjacent disciplines that is available both as structured text and as an R package.
Sensible Adventures
A sporadically-updated collection of stories and children's books I have published.