Summer Sprint Summary

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Last week, the Mozilla Science Lab hosted its first-ever global sprint. Dozens of people joined in from 18 cities (and a few from home) to work for two days on a wide variety of projects, ranging from new lessons to tools for mining the scientific literature. The MSL blog has all the details, and will have a series of posts about what was done over the next couple of weeks, but here are a few Software Carpentry-specific highlights:

• Lots of progress on a tool to manage administration of Software Carpentry bootcamps.
• New Data Carpentry lessons on Excel, social science examples, and Pandas.
• Some capstone examples for Software Carpentry, including bioinformatics lessons in R and Python, an oceanography lesson, and a lesson on medical imaging.
• Some data visualization examples that will be used in lesson on how to choose a visualization, and a lesson on using ggplot2 in R.
• "Why would you learn X?" slides for Python and R.
• A "training wheels" profile for the IPython Notebook that novices can use in workshops.
• Lots of smaller fixes and reviews.

There's lots more on the MSL blog, including content mining tools to unlock scientific literature, progress on the Open Access Button, and a first crack at using package managers for lessons (see this post from Raniere Silva for more information). Our thanks to everyone who took part, and to everyone who helped organize and run the event—we look forward to working with you all again soon.