Software Carpentry for Women

ARCHER, the UK's national supercomputing service offers training in software development and high-performance computing to scientists and researchers across the UK. As part of our training service we are running a 2 day Software Carpentry workshop for Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) in collaboration with the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) and Women in HPC (WHPC). This event will be held at University of Manchester, UK, on 14-15 December 2015.

Whilst this course is supported by WHPC and will be led by an all-female training team to encourage participation of women in science and engineering, please be assured that everyone is welcome to attend.

Details

Software Carpentry workshops help researchers become more productive by teaching software development skills that enable more to be done, in less time, and with less pain. We will cover skills including version control, task automation, good programming practice and automated testing. These are skills that, in an ideal world, researchers would master before tackling anything with "cloud" or "peta" or "HPC" in their name, skills that enable researchers to optimise their time and provide them with a secure basis to optimise and parallelise their code.

Intended learning outcomes

On completing this course, attendees should be familiar with the concepts of:

• Version control
• Task automation
• Good programming practice
• Automated testing

Prerequisites

To attend, you must have some experience of writing code or scripts and be familiar with programming concepts including conditionals, loops, arrays and functions. You should also be comfortable with using the bash shell. For an introduction to the shell, please see, for example Software Carpentry's lessons on The Unix Shell. You will also need to bring a laptop with software needed for the workshop installed, please see the workshop page for details.

Timetable

* * * Provisional - Timetable may be subject to change * * *

Day 1

• 09:30 - 10:00 - Welcome and software set-up
• 10:00 - 11:00 - Automating tasks with the Unix shell part 1
• 11:00 - 11:15 - Break
• 11:15 - 12:30 - Automating tasks with the Unix shell part 2
• 12:30 - 13:30 - Lunch
• 13:30 - 15:00 - Structured programming with Python
• 15:00 - 15:30 - Break
• 15:30 - 17:00 - Structured programming with Python (cont.)
• 17:00 - 17:30 - Wrap-up
• 17:30 - 18:30 - Panel discussion: Women in IT
• 18:30 - Close

Day 2

• 09:30 - 11:00 - Version control with Git part 1
• 11:00 - 11:15 - Break
• 11:15 - 12:30 - Version control with Git part 2
• 12:30 - 13:30 - Lunch
• 13:30 - 14:30 - Working collaboratively in GitHub
• 14:30 - 15:00 - Break
• 15:00 - 17:00 - Quality assurance and testing in Python
• 17:00 - 17:30 - Wrap-up
• 17:30 - Close

Course Materials

Slides and exercise material for this course are available here.

During the course information may be shared between tutors and participants using the course hackpad.

Location

The course will be held at University of Manchester

Registration

Please use the registration page to register for ARCHER courses.

Questions?

If you have any questions please contact the ARCHER Helpdesk.