Software Carpentry at INTECOL13

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On 21st August 2013, we'll be attending INTECOL13 in London's Docklands. The 11th International Congress of Ecology, hosted by the British Ecological Society and INTECOL, is one of the world's premier conference for ecologists. At the invitation of Matthew Smith of the BES Computational Ecology Specialist Interest Group and Microsoft Research, Software Carpentry and The Software Sustainability Institute have a talk and a session.

Steve Crouch will present a talk on behalf of Greg Wilson, on "better computational practices for research". This session will highlight the problems faced by researchers who develop software, and ecologists in particular, including the tractability, development and reproducibility of ecological models, and discuss possible solutions.

After runs at Effective Scientific Programming, Digital Social Research and Dev8D, Mike Jackson will chair another discussion on "what makes good code good". This session will explore what ecologists view as good code, how ecologists learn about good code, the blockers to producing good code and how these can be overcome, by research leaders, institutions, funders, and ourselves.

We look forward to reporting on our experiences.