Carpentry Connect Davis

Over the weekend of May 30 - June 1, Hao attended Carpentry Connect Davis. Here’s a short write-up of what he did

Jetstream/XSEDE

Jetstream/XSEDE is an NSF-funded cloud-environment for computing. The interface is a bit more friendly than typical university high-performance computing environments (IMO). You can select different levels of virtual machines, with hardware spec appropriate to your use case, and with different pre-installed programming languages and packages for whatever you need to do.

Followup Qs:

• how do you get large datasets onto a VM
• how to get access / funding / computer time

Binder

Binder is a tool for creating and sharing interactive coding environments through a web browser. The goal is to address the difficulties associated with reproducing a data analysis, namely:

• computer
• programming language
• packages and other dependencies
• code
• data

Binder works by using repo2docker to create a Docker image from a GitHub repo – this encapsulates all the files within the repo (including data and code), as well as the programming language and packages. The result is a link, that when clicked, launches a virtual machine with an instance of the image, and allows for testing out the code from within a web browser (without needing to install anything).

Followup Qs:

• sustainability of funding for continued operations
• potential uses in teaching or sharing of data journalism stories

Pathways for Community Involvement with the Carpentries

One of the discussion points among folks in attendance was: “What do you do after you attend a workshop?” There are several possible next steps:

• practice and build skills in a community (great if there are local groups, such as R-Ladies or similar)
• get involved with helping and instructing at future workshops (great if there’s a local group or folks who actively lead organization of workshops)
• become involved in other ways?

Followup Qs:

• what are best practices for finding or starting a local community? how do you acquire those skills?
• what can Carpentries do to help with this?
• how can different ways to become involved with Carpentries (e.g. lesson contributor, maintainer, mentor, helper, etc.) be better advertised or roles adjusted to improve community interaction?

• 2021 1
• 2020 1
• 2019 3
• 2018 7