Our Indiana U Workshop Went Well

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Our two-day bootcamp at Indiana U. on March 7 and 8 went well—while less than half of the people who registered actually showed up (more on that in a moment), everyone who did attend the two days seemed to get a lot out of it. Special thanks are due to Prof. Andy Lumsdaine (host), Jennifer Richards (organizer), and Ben Martin, Randy Heiland, Joe Cottam, Mike Hansen, DongInn Kim, and Purdue's own Jeff Shelton for helping out.

At the end, we asked everyone to give us one good and one bad thing about the bootcamp:

Good

Bad

Shell scripting
Data provenance
Tips on efficiency and coding
The five-step cycle (update, write tests, make them pass, refactor, commit)
Where to find more info
Got started with basic Unix
Good structure
Comfortable environment
Good examples
Help team was awesome
Website is useful
Saw lots of new tools
Examples were talked through
Energetic instructor
Good breadth
Test-driven development
Version control
Enjoyed the stories (even though they weren't all true)

Didn't get to web stuff
Didn't get to look at code examples long enough
Went too fast through Python
Less support for Windows users
Not enough exercises
Not enough time to practice
Didn't see how to create databases (only how to query them)
Too much breadth
Didn't see how to create a repository
No reference guide/cheat sheet
Didn't explain keyboard shortcuts
Printed instruction would have helped (ESL)
Free lunch is nice, but what about free breakfast?
Some parts too advanced
Too much typing: should be more pre-cooked data files for download
Time was too limited
Didn't show IPython
Too many "drive-by" topics
No capstone exercise to bring everything together
Dove into databases too quickly

I agree with most of what's in the second column (especially the comment about breakfast). What I want to fix first, though, is the high no-show rate that plagues any free event. One suggestion is to charge people $20 or so when they register, then refund it when they show up, so that only no-shows wind up paying anything. What would your reaction to that be?

We'll start online tutorials with our Indiana students next week—like their predecessors from the Space Telescope Science Institute, they'll meet once a week to work through a few simple problems that are directly relevant to their research. Next up: the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.