Blogging for the Carpentries - We Want to Hear From You

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

This is an open invitation to our community members to share their knowledge.

We have a global community working in many different disciplines using a vast range of tools. On our blog, we would like to tap into that community experience and then share that hard-won knowledge.

This kind of information could help people new to a discipline, or might inspire others to try out a tool they have never used before.

Time wasted or time saved?

As with all learning, there is an opportunity cost; time spent learning new tools is time stolen from essential research.

So the first decision might be whether you can spare the time to learn something new, though that might not be the hardest decision. After all, if a tool pays off in increased efficiency and time savings down the track, then that time is definitely well spent.

But which tool should you pick? For what purpose?

This is where experience in a discipline is so valuable. After all, anyone working with statistics can probably make a great case for R.

We would like to hear from community members willing to share their experiences.

Posts on My Workflow from senior researchers in a discipline would be a fantastic resource for newcomers.

Posts about My Favorite Tool and Why I Love it would help others decide whether to put in the time to master it.

You may be thinking “I am way, way too busy” to do this so we want to make it easy for you. We have a form with some prompts for you to fill in. Just a few short lines are all we need, and we will do the rest.

Worried you have made errors in the form after submitting it? Anxious you have omitted something important? We will let you review the post before it goes out.

So what are you waiting for? Please tell us your story today!