PyCon here we come!

By Damien Irving.

At the beginning of 2013, I was part of an organising team that hosted the first ever Software Carpentry bootcamps outside of North America and Europe. Our events in Sydney and Melbourne were a great success, so I gave a presentation at PyCon 2013 in Hobart to try and generate some ongoing interest in Australia (see clip below). In that presentation I was fairly bullish about Software Carpentry’s future prospects, however I couldn’t possibly have anticipated just how popular the bootcamps would become. In 2013 there were more than 100 bootcamps hosted in 12 different countries for over 4000 researchers, and those numbers are expected to increase by at least 50% in 2014. What’s more, we’ve now hosted over 10 bootcamps in Australia and there are many more on the way in the coming months.

Naturally, I attribute most of Software Carpentry’s success to my presentation at PyCon 2013. I’m therefore very excited to be attending PyCon 2014 in Brisbane, where I’ll be participating in a number of Software Carpentry related activities. First and foremost, myself, Philipp Bayer and Tim McNamara will be teaching a two-day bootcamp at the University of Queensland on the Wednesday and Thursday prior to conference (July 30-31; see here for details). Tim Dettrick (#ResBaz lead developer and all round programming guru) will also attend as a helper/tutor, which is great news for the bootcamp participants. 

I’ll then give a presentation at the main PyCon conference about Software Carpentry. My talk will focus on the lessons we’ve learned teaching basic software skills to researchers, before turning to future plans and directions for our activities in Australia. In particular, I’ll be announcing the various Software Carpentry things we’ll be doing at the Research Bazaar conference in February next year. This is going to be a massive event - we’d love to see you there as a participant and/or as part of our Software Carpentry teaching team! 



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