Summary of June 2014 Lab Meeting

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At our monthly lab meeting yesterday (June 26), we discussed a wide range of topics (though only about half as much as was on the agenda). Details notes and votes are below; the key points are:

  1. We would like to do what we can to help the careers of people who volunteer for Software Carpentry. In particular, we'd like to find a way to highlight people who have taught lots of bootcamps, contributed lots of material, or both, without discouraging people who haven't, or getting into a situation in which bootcamp hosts ask, "Why aren't you sending your most experienced people to us?" We've opened a GitHub issue for people who'd like to discuss this topic, and we'd be grateful if you could share experiences with other systems and suggestions about what we could do.
  2. We will have a meeting on Thursday, July 3 to discuss plans for the July 22-23 sprint. The time and connection details will be posted here on July 2.
  3. People were either neutral or in favor of switching to Python 3. There was concern about compatibility, but it seems that most scientific packages are now Py3-compatible (and that there are some that only work with Py3, and not with Py2). In practice, this will mean:
    • changing what people have on their machine when they leave the bootcamp, and
    • minor modifications to our lessons (e.g., print as a function).
  4. By default, Mercurial launches a GUI diff/merge tool when there's a conflict rather than displaying a textual diff. Novices seem to find side-by-side merge easier to work with, which raises the question: should we use a graphical tool for diff and merge when teaching Git as well? Again, most people were either neutral or in favor, subject to ease of installation. We'll try this at a couple of workshops in the coming months and report back.
  5. Should we install Matt Davis's ipythonblocks module by default? Nobody was opposed, but it turned out that only a handful of people actually use it in teaching. We'll poll our instructors to find out more about usage before making a final decision.
  6. In order to make it easy for people who want to teach regular expressions to do so, we'll integrate the software that runs regexpal.com (which ironically is down at the time of this writing) into the bc repo so that instructors can create a page in their bootcamp site where learners can play around.
  7. Jonah Duckles has created a pull request that would change the way installation instructions are managed. Instead of editing _includes/setup.html, instructors would add a list of topics to the header of index.html that Jekyll's templating logic would use to control what is and isn't displayed. Most people were in favor, so we'll merge this once the PR is finished.
  8. Many people are still not happy with the way our lesson materials are organized, or with what pre-requisite knowledge we actually expect. We will organize a meeting for next Thursday (July 3) to talk about options, then open a discussion issue on GitHub if we can come up with concrete alternatives.
  9. Raniere Silva has been working over the last few weeks to generate EPUB and PDF from our materials. The goal is to allow anyone who wants to produce book-form notes to do so for use in a regular class, to give to learners after a bootcamp, or for self-study. He's been making good progress, but there are still lots of small problems (particularly with the PDF). We'll be hacking on this at the sprint.

Agenda

Attendees (Second Round)

Attendees (First Round)

Announcements

Directions

July 22-23 Sprint

Other Business

Volunteers/Reviewers Wanted (we didn't get to this because time ran out)