A vision for The Hacker Within

By Damien Irving.

At the inaugural #HackerWin meeting to be held in a couple of weeks time, we’re going to discuss what the group should do over the next 12-months and beyond.

To get the conversation started, I wanted to document my thoughts on the topic. First and foremost, I’m suggesting that our mission should definitely be to have all #UniMelb (and eventually all Melbourne) researchers coding like in the movies… ;-)

In order to help researchers achieve movie-like proficiency, my vision for the group centres around regular meetings and three key activities:

  1. Consultations / code review

  2. Informal presentations on packages / tools

  3. Feedback to ITS Research on the needs of the research community

The first of these activities would be achieved by building up a database of willing tutors. For instance, I would be willing to put my hand up to help people who are having trouble with the Shell, Python, or Git. Others might be willing to help people with Matlab, R, and so on. We could then invite graduate students and university staff to request assistance via an online form. They would be linked up with a suitable tutor for a one-on-one consultation, or they could bring their problem to the next fortnightly meeting and have the entire #HackerWin group work on it.

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Which of these tools/languages/approaches would you be willing to help other researchers with?


In addition to live problem solving (or ‘hacking’), the regular meetings could also involve informal presentations. For instance, I’ve recently started using a Python style checker called Pylint, so I could give an informal presentation on what I’ve learned about programming with style. This mixture of hacking and informal presentations would provide the ongoing support and development opportunities that a one-off Software Carpentry bootcamp cannot.

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Pair programming is a well established practice in the software development industry, and yet researchers rarely look at each other’s code. We need to change that. [Source]

Perhaps most importantly, #HackerWin would also provide feedback to the ITS Research department on the needs of the community. If Greg senses that the graduate students in his Astrophysics and Astronomy group would benefit from a short course on data management using R, then the #HackerWin meetings would be a perfect place to bring this to the attention of ITS Research.

Of course, this is only my personal vision for #HackerWin. I’m hoping others will have many additional and better ideas, so please come along to our next meeting and share your ideas!