We ran a two-day bootcamp at Mozilla's office in Toronto last week for people from local research hospitals. It seemed to go well: only 28 of the 37 who'd registered showed up, but with a couple of exceptions because of scheduling conflicts, everyone who showed up on day 1 came back on day 2. Many thanks to Dhavide Aruliah, Yele Bonilla, Mike Conley, Gabriel Devenyi, Fan Dong, and Blake Winton for helping out.
Good
Bad
New Tools
Good teachers
Good supply of paper/book references
Useful simple bash scripts for analyzing text files
Snacks: mmm...
New plotting tools to replace Matlab
Shell tools interesting
Importance of version control
Preview of IPython Notebook
Stickies for feedback
Good coverage basics (didn't jump right in to Python)
Impressing upon us that everyone's research is relevant
Digressions on learning psychology
Not enough testing covered
Python installation problems
Some examples didn't work
More hands-on Python needed
Digressions on learning psychology
Numerical analysis parts too mathematical
Need short overnight exercises to support learning