The Carpentries at 25
7 December 2023
To mark the 25th anniversary of the first Software Carpentry workshop, The Carpentries have been running a series of online events to share experiences and memories. EPCC's Mike Jackson, who took part in one of the events, writes about EPCC's involvement with this teaching community.
It is now 25 years since the first Software Carpentry workshop was held with the goal of teaching researchers valuable computational skills to achieve more, in less time, and with less difficulty. Today The Carpentries, which include Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry and Library Carpentry, have become a valuable source of training, teaching foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide.
To celebrate this 25th anniversary, The Carpentries have been running a series of online events to share experiences and memories. I was invited to take part in the Canada, Europe, US Spotlight event on 9th November 2023.
Early days
My first contact with Software Carpentry was in 2011, when I was working with The Software Sustainability Institute, of which EPCC is a founding partner. I and my Institute colleague Steve Crouch at the University of Southampton were asked to develop online lectures for Software Carpentry in advanced shell techniques and exploring directories and files using Python.
Then in 2012 Steve, my EPCC and Institute colleague Neil Chue Hong, Steve McGough of the Digital Institute at Newcastle University, and myself attended an early UK Software Carpentry workshop (then called a boot camp) at Imperial College London. It was run by Software Carpentry's founder Greg Wilson (a former member of EPCC, I discovered later!) and with Chris Cannam of Sound Software.
Over two scorching Spring days, crammed into a lecture theatre with 50 or so others, we feverishly noted down everything Greg and Chris said and did. The intent was that we would then run the first UK Software Carpentry workshop to be delivered entirely by UK-based instructors, to help further bootstrap Software Carpentry in the UK. This we did just two weeks later (in at the deep end!) at Newcastle University.
The Carpentries and EPCC
From those early beginnings, EPCC now helps to coordinate and deliver Carpentries courses across the UK, as part of the Software Sustainability Institute's training services. Carpentries courses are included in the training portfolio offered by EPCC as part of the ARCHER2 UK National Supercomputing Service. We are members of both local and national Carpentries communities including the Edinburgh Carpentries and the UK Carpentries.
When instructing on Software Carpentry courses, I have commented that even if the only thing an attendee learns is that the up arrow takes them to the previous Bash shell command they ran, then that will be a significant future time-saving on their part. This is just one small example of how The Carpentries can enhance researchers' skills and cater for a real need within research communities, as evidenced by their growth over the past 25 years into a truly global community.
Here's to the next 25 years!
The Carpentries 25th Anniversary Celebration Series: Canada, Europe, and US Spotlight Event
A recording of the event in which I participated is available on the Carpentries YouTube channel. (Viewers are cautioned that, following the Law of Virtual Event Recording, my internet connection, which was fine before and after the event, did drop out a couple of times during!)
