A successful workshop in Newcastle

We helped to organise the Software Carpentry bootcamp at Newcastle university this week, in collaboration with the Newcastle Digital Institute and the Software Sustainability Institute.

Unlike the UCL event and our earlier 2010 Autumn School, this event was run entirely by the local organisers without having Greg Wilson (of Software Carpentry) present.

SoundSoftware contributed the version control segment (as at UCL, using Mercurial with EasyMercurial and Bitbucket); the Digital Institute's Stephen McGough presented the shell, and Steve Crouch and Mike Jackson of the SSI presented on Python, databases, and broader topics in scientific software development.

As is traditional at Software Carpentry events, we asked the attendees to cite good and bad points about the workshop during the wrap-up session. You can read the full list here. It's clear that we still have work to do on maintaining a good presentational flow for interactive typed material, as some of the bad points related to material being hard to follow on-screen or being presented too quickly. These things should be readily improved with practice, though: the version control segment was the only one to have the same presenter as in the previous workshop, and many of the glitches from that event had been ironed out this time.

Despite some negative points, almost all of the attendees said they had enjoyed the event and expected to be able to put the material to use in their work.

You can find links to the slides and tutorial material from the workshop at the bottom of this page.