Online
August 7th, 14th & 21st, 2024
9:00 am - 1:00 pm MT
Instructors: Madison Langseth, Chris Sherwood, Marc Hunter, Brandon Serna, Labeeb Ahmed
Helpers: Josh von Nonn, C. Justin Mayers, Bojan Milinic, Joshua May, Jordan Lubbers
Software Carpentry aims to help researchers get their work done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic research computing skills. This hands-on workshop will cover basic concepts and tools, including program design, version control, data management, and task automation. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems.
For more information on what we teach and why, please see our paper "Best Practices for Scientific Computing".
Who: The course is aimed at graduate students and other researchers. You don't need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop.
Where: This training will take place online. The instructors will provide you with the information you will need to connect to this meeting.
When: August 7th, 14th & 21st, 2024. Add to your Google Calendar.
Requirements: Participants must have access to a computer with a Mac, Linux, or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc.) that they have administrative privileges on. They should have a few specific software packages installed (listed below).
Accessibility: We are dedicated to providing a positive and accessible learning environment for all. Please notify the instructors in advance of the workshop if you require any accommodations or if there is anything we can do to make this workshop more accessible to you.
Contact: Please email mlangseth@usgs.gov , gdonovan@usgs.gov or lhsu@usgs.gov for more information.
Roles: To learn more about the roles at the workshop (who will be doing what), refer to our Workshop FAQ.
Everyone who participates in Carpentries activities is required to conform to the Code of Conduct. This document also outlines how to report an incident if needed.
We will use this collaborative document for chatting, taking notes, and sharing URLs and bits of code.
Please be sure to complete these surveys before and after the workshop.
| Before starting | Pre-workshop survey |
| 9:00 | Introducing the Shell & Navigating Files and Directories |
| 10:00 | Plotting and Programming in Python - Summary and Setup |
| 11:00 | Break |
| 11:30 | Plotting and Programming in Python - Data Types and Type Conversion |
| 13:00 | End |
| 9:00 | Plotting and Programming in Python - Reading Tabular Data into DataFrames |
| 11:00 | Break |
| 11:30 | Plotting and Programming in Python - Lists |
| 13:00 | End |
| 9:00 | Plotting and Programming in Python - Looping Over Data Sets |
| 11:00 | Break |
| 11:30 | Plotting and Programming in Python - Programming Style |
| 13:00 | End |
To participate in a Software Carpentry workshop, you will need access to software as described below. In addition, you will need an up-to-date web browser.
We maintain a list of common issues that occur during installation as a reference for instructors that may be useful on the Configuration Problems and Solutions wiki page.
We will be using Microsoft Teams as the videoconferencing client.
Like other Carpentries workshops, you will be learning by "coding along" with the Instructors. To do this, you will need to have both the window for the tool you will be learning about (a terminal, RStudio, your web browser, etc..) and the window for the Teams video conference client open. In order to see both at once, we recommend using one of the following set up options:
Bash is a commonly-used shell that gives you the power to do tasks more quickly.
This will provide you with both Git and Bash in the Git Bash program.
The default shell in Mac OS X Ventura and newer versions is Zsh, but
Bash is available in all versions, so no need to install anything.
You access Bash from the Terminal (found in
/Applications/Utilities).
See the Git installation video tutorial
for an example on how to open the Terminal.
You may want to keep Terminal in your dock for this workshop.
To see if your default shell is Bash type echo $SHELL
in Terminal and press the Return key. If the message
printed does not end with '/bash' then your default is something
else, you can change your current shell to Bash by typing
bash and then pressing Return. To check
your current shell type echo $0 and press Return.
To change your default shell to Bash type chsh -s /bin/bash and
press the Return key, then reboot for the change to take effect. To
change your default back to Zsh, type chsh -s /bin/zsh, press the
Return key and reboot. To check available shells, type
cat /etc/shells.
Python is a popular language for research computing, and great for general-purpose programming as well. Installing all of its research packages individually can be a bit difficult, so USGS recommends Miniforge, an all-in-one installer.
We will teach Python using the JupyterLab, a programming environment that runs in a web browser (JupyterLab will need to be installed along with a couple of other packages). For JupyterLab to work you will need a reasonably up-to-date browser. The current versions of the Chrome, Safari and Firefox browsers are all supported (some older browsers, including Internet Explorer version 9 and below, are not).
conda install pandas matplotlib jupyter m2-baseyYou need to download some files to follow this lesson.
conda install pandas matplotlib jupyter m2-baseyYou need to download some files to follow this lesson.