Wrapping Up the Carpentries Python Curriculum Project

On April 6th, 2021, The Carpentries made a blog post announcing the “Maintenance and Development of The Carpentries’ Python Curriculum” project. This project was generously funded by the Python Software Foundation’s Scientific Working group, and over the past twelve weeks, I’ve been working on it to improve and develop Python lessons for The Carpentries community. As it comes to an end, I’d like to summarize the project’s accomplishments and how my experience was as a maintainer.

Project summary

During the project duration, we had 118 commits merged across twelve repositories in three Carpentries programs: Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Carpentries Incubator. There are nine open pull requests that would merge an additional 36 commits. The lesson with the most accepted contributions was the “Python Novice Gapminder” lesson from Software Carpentry, with a total of 32 merged commits. Other lessons with accepted contributions include:

• Geospatial Python (14 commits)
• Python Packaging and Publishing (14 commits)
• Python Novice Inflammation (6 commits)
• Python Social Science (16 commits)
• Docker Introduction (2 commits)
• Machine Learning Novice Sklearn (2 commits)
• Other repositories (30 commits)

While working on these repositories, I also became aware of the HPC Python lesson developed by the HPC Carpentry community and made some contributions there, with two commits merged.

In addition to pull requests on GitHub, a large portion of the Python Ecology lesson was translated to Brazilian Portuguese. These contributions were made in Transifex, the translation platform used by Carpentries (specifically, by the Carpentries-i18n organization) to manage translations of lessons. Some lessons are already fully translated to Spanish, and this was a preliminary experience with translations to Brazilian Portuguese in Transifex. The #carpentries_pt channel was created in the Carpentries Slack to bring together the Portuguese-speaking community and people interested in Portuguese translations.

Working on this project was an enriching experience. I’ve found all lesson maintainers to be welcoming and supportive of contributions. I have since applied to be a maintainer for a lesson in the Carpentries Incubator and hope to continue contributing to the Carpentries community. I thank all the volunteer lesson maintainers for taking the time to review my pull requests. I’d also like to express my gratitude to all of The Carpentries Core Team members for supporting my proposal and the project itself throughout its execution. I especially thank Toby Hodges and Erin Becker for meeting with me and discussing the project. Both The Carpentries and Python Software Foundation are invaluable for the scientific research community, and I hope to see more efforts like this again.