NeSI & Scion Software Carpentry Workshop
The last quarter has been a busy time at NeSI for training activities. On November 24 and 25, we helped run the first Software Carpentry workshop at Scion. 17 researchers attended the event and the workshop was taught by three instructors: Martin Bader (Scion), Luke Boyle (University of Auckland and NZGL) and Aleksandra Pawlik (NeSI).
Being an expert on R, Martin presented this part of the material. Martin is not only an advanced user of R in his research, but also teaches the programming language to his colleagues. His experience and knowledge were invaluable during the workshop as he could relate the taught material to the examples from his own work.
Luke, who taught the command line module, collaborates with some of the Scion researchers and hence is familiar with the training needs among them. Luke has signed up for the New Zealand Software and Data Carpentry Instructor Training run by NeSI in January 2017 and plans to join the pool of certified instructors next year.
The workshop was an opportunity for some discussions on the research infrastructure that Scion offers to their researchers. In particular, managing source code through version control. Since the Software Carpentry curriculum also covers Git and GitHub, these discussions fitted the event very well.
The workshop was made possible thanks to the support of Melissa Evans, Richard Waldin and Brian Clement, all of Scion.
