2016 Election: Raniere Silva

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

My name is Raniere Gaia Costa da Silva and I’m standing for re-election to Software Carpentry Steering Committee because working on the Steering Committee in 2016 was fun and a great way to meet some of the amazing members of Software Carpentry community.

Background

I have a B.Sc. in Apply Mathematics from the University of Campinas, Brazil, and in the last year I worked as a freelancer software developer using most of the time Python and Javascript. This year I will move to the UK for work on the University of Manchester and collaborate with The Software Sustainability Institute.

Previous Involvement

I discovered Software Carpentry in 2013 (I wish that I did it early) and contacted Greg asking to be in the next round of instructor training, what happened in 2013’s Fall, because I was trying to do Software Carpentry like workshops in Brazil.

In 2014 I sent some pull requests to the lessons (mostly to Shell, Git and Python), annoyed Greg because we use Python 2 and not Python 3, helped over-engineering our crazy lesson template, and delivery the first half dozen of Software Carpentry in Brazil.

Last year, because of Steering Committee activities I significant drop the number of pull request sent to the lessons (something that I missed very much). On the Steering Committee my biggest contribution was leading the Mentoring Subcommittee that host the post workshop debriefing sessions and the help & instructor retreat that happened last Fall. If you want to read more about what I was involved in 2015 check this blog post.

Plans for 2016

In 2016, independent of the result of the Steering Committee election, I want to focus on the assessment of achievements that our students had after attend our workshops because this is a important piece to Software Carpentry sustainability and expansion.

I will not leave the Mentoring Subcommittee because it is one of the ways to get data for assessments but I hope to pass the leadership of it to one of our current members.

If I was elected I want be secretary of 2016 Steering Committee because although we did a good job with the minutes of the meetings I believe that we could do it a lot better.

A few extra things that I want to do but don’t plan to spend many hours are:

• run our first workshop in Portugal (or any other country that speaks Portuguese),
• collaborate to workshops in Latin America continue to be offered, and
• translate the lessons to Portuguese (or any other language).

More

Sometimes I write in my blog about book that I read, cities that I visited, things that I tried to hack and Software Carpentry workshops that I taught.

Some of my projects are on GitHub. Most of them are old and abandoned. =(

If you have any question, please send me a email or tweet. You can also call me on IRC (raniere at Freenode) or Slack.