Workshops I Want
Following up on yesterday’s post, here are some workshops I’d really like to take. If you’re offering any of them, please let me know.
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Experimental design and analysis for software engineers who are trying to figure out how well their AI-based tools actually work.
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An introduction to the social sciences for programmers who want to understand how power actually works in our society. (See Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code for some thoughts.)
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Distributed systems design by example—basically, a sequel to Software Design by Example in which learners build working models of distributed systems in order to understand how the real things work.
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Systems administration for data scientists (or, what people who wrangle dataframes for a living need to know in order to deploy an application for others to use). This request is mostly professional curiosity: I’ve tried and failed to create this, and would like to see how others do it.
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Managing research software projects—not “how to use Git” but hiring and firing, marketing, budgeting, succession planning, and similar challenges. Again, I’ve also tried and failed to create this, so my interest here is partly professional curiosity.
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Organizational change for research software engineers. We spend a lot of our time rolling rocks up hills; as I approach the end of my career, I’d really like someone to teach me how to get rid of the damn hills. Note: we’re working on this one; please reach out if you’d like to help.
In a better world than this, Canada would have a Natural Science and Engineering Education Council alongside NSERC to fund the creation, dissemination, delivery, and evaluation of teaching and training materials. Alas, that is not the timeline we’re in…