- Since 1998, - Software Carpentry has been teaching researchers - the computing skills they need to get more done in less time and with less pain. - Our volunteer instructors - have run hundreds of events - for more than 34,000 researchers since 2012. - All of our lesson materials are freely reusable - under the Creative Commons - Attribution license. + Software Carpentry develops and teaches workshops on the fundamental programming skills needed to conduct research. + Our mission is to provide researchers high-quality, domain-specific training + covering all aspects of research software engineering.
- The Software Carpentry Foundation - and its sibling lesson project, Data Carpentry, - have merged to become The Carpentries, a fiscally sponsored project of Community Initiatives, - a 501(c)3 non-profit incorporated in the United States. See the staff page for The Carpentries. -
- -- Software Carpentry is made possible by the generous support of - our member organisations - and by the hard work of our volunteers. - We offer several levels of institutional engagement. We provide - many - ways people can engage with our community. -
-- You can host a workshop - or attend one that someone else is hosting. - Our code of conduct - and operations guides - describe how our workshops are organised and run. -
-- You can send us email, - sign up for our newsletter, - read our blog, - follow The Carpentries on Mastodon, - or browse and raise issues against our repositories on GitHub. -
-- As an open source project, - we rely on volunteers to - create our lessons. -
-- Best Practices in Scientific Computing - and - Software Carpentry: Lessons Learned - summarize what we've learned. -
-- In 1995-96, - Greg Wilson organized a series of articles in IEEE Computational Science & Engineering titled, - "What Should Computer Scientists Teach to Physical Scientists and Engineers?" - These articles grew out of his frustration working with scientists - who wanted to parallelize complex programs - but didn't know what version control was, - how to write a unit test, - or even why they should break their programs down into functions. -
-- In response, - John Reynders (then director of the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory) - invited Wilson and Brent Gorda (now at Intel) to teach a week-long course to LANL staff. - The course ran for the first time in July 1998, - and was repeated nine times over the next four years. - It eventually wound down as the principals moved on to other projects, - but taught us two valuable lessons: -
-- There is tremendous pent-up demand for training in basic skills. -
-- Textbook software engineering is not the right thing to teach most scientists. -
-- The Software Carpentry materials were updated and released under a Creative Commons license in 2004-05 - thanks to support from the Python Software Foundation. - They attracted 1000-2000 unique visitors a month, - with occasional spikes correlated to courses and mentions in other sites, - and were used in a semester-long graduate course offered in 2007-09 at the University of Toronto. - Again, - we learned some valuable lessons; - the most important is that - while faculty in science, engineering, and medicine will agree that their students should learn more about computing, - they won't agree on what to take out of the current curriculum to make room for it. - Until that changes, - we have to deliver our lessons "between" standard courses. -
-- Greg Wilson left the University of Toronto in April 2010 to reboot Software Carpentry - with support from nine sponsor organizations. - Over the next year, - he recorded 120 short video lessons and ran half a dozen week-long classes for his backers. -
-- This version of Software Carpentry was much more successful than its predecessors, - in part because the scientific landscape itself had changed. - Open access publishing, citizen science, and dozens of other innovations - had convinced scientists that they needed to be able to do more than just crunch numbers. - We also made contact with like-minded organizations, - particularly The Hacker Within, - who showed us that intensive two-day workshops worked better than week-long classes. - Putting this all together led to our current model: -
-- Curriculum is developed and improved in a public repository - using methods borrowed from the open source software community. -
-- Instructors volunteer their time, - while workshop host sites cover their travel and accommodation costs. -
-- Instructors use live coding instead of slides - while learners following along on their own machines. -
-- In the fall of 2011, - Wilson worked with the Mozilla Foundation to prepare a grant to the Sloan Foundation - to put Software Carpentry on a more stable financial footing. - That grant, - awarded in January 2012, - and a second one later that year - paid for Wilson and some administrative support, - which allowed us to increase the number of workshops. - In turn, - that growth led to us starting a training program - to teach instructors the basics of educational psychology and instructional design. -
-- Wilson left Mozilla in July 2014 to help found the Software Carpentry Foundation, - an independent non-profit volunteer sponsored by NumFOCUS. - Software Carpentry's governing body is a Steering Committee, - which is elected from and by its members - and assisted by an Advisory Board made up of representatives from partner organizations. - The Foundation's first Steering Committee - was elected in January 2015, - and in October 2015 - Jonah Duckles began work - as the Foundation's new Executive Director. + Having started in 1998, + Software Carpentry is now a lesson program within The Carpentries. + Its focus is on the the computing skills researchers need to get more done in less time and with less pain, + and its volunteer instructors + have run thousands of events for almost one hundred thousand people since 2012. + Our target audience is researchers who have some prior programming experience + but who are largely self-taught + and are ready to move from writing short programs for personal use + to collaborating with others on larger, reusable pieces of software.
-In February 2018, Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry merged their projects together -into a new project, The Carpentries, sponsored by Community Initiatives. -With this merger, Software Carpentry has combined staff, budget and governance to form the new project. -The Carpentries continue the work of Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry, realizing that -the communities of instructors, members and lesson developers are stronger working together. With over 50 -member organizations in 10 countries, The Carpentries seek to build and grow communities of practice around -computational skills development for researchers. + We teach hands-on workshops in the Unix shell, verison control, and programming in languages such as Python and R + to increase computational competence and improve research efficiency. + Our evidence-based pedagogy, + combined with rapid iteration on content, + ensures that our lessons are directly connected to real scientific questions + and directly relevant to participants' research. + We create a friendly environment for learning to empower researchers, + and all of our lesson materials are freely reusable under an open license.
+ Workshops like ours cannot teach people everything they need to know about research software engineering, + but they drastically reduce the barrier to entry + and impart the skills and confidence needed for continued learning and engagement. To learn more about our history and the lessons we've learned along the way, - please see the paper - "Software Carpentry: Lessons Learned". + please see "Software Carpentry: Lessons Learned".