June 6-7, 2018
8:30 am - 4:30 pm
Instructors: Kalin Kiesling, Matthew Garcia, Taylor Scott, Patrick Shriwise
Helpers: Stephen Meyer, Dorothea Salo, Brian Cornille, Christina Koch, Lauren Michael
Registration is required and will be available here starting May 9, 2018 at 5 pm. Make sure to read all details below before registering and to choose appropriately between UW-Madison’s Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry workshops.
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 researchers who have no prior experience with programming and just want to get started in some basic skills for organizing, combining, and visualizing data, our UW-Madison Data Carpentry workshop (June 4-5) will likely be more appropriate. These two workshops are NOT intended to be taken back-to-back, and you can learn about future workshops at UW-Madison by joining the mailing list of UW-Madison's Advanced Computing Initiative.
For more information on what we teach and why, please see our paper "Best Practices for Scientific Computing".
Who: The course is aimed at UW-Madison graduate students and other UW-Madison researchers. Some prior experience with programming is strongly recommended. However, you don't need to have any previous knowledge of the specific tools that will be presented at the workshop.
Where: Sterling Hall, room 2425. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.
When: June 6-7, 2018. Add to your Google Calendar.
Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop 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). They are also required to abide by Software Carpentry's Code of Conduct.
Accessibility: We are committed to making this workshop accessible to everybody. The workshop organizers have checked that:
Materials will be provided in advance of the workshop and large-print handouts are available if needed by notifying the organizers in advance. If we can help making learning easier for you (e.g. sign-language interpreters, lactation facilities) please get in touch (using contact details below) and we will attempt to provide them.
Contact: Please email megarcia@wisc.edu for more information.
Please be sure to complete these surveys before and after the workshop.
| 08:30 | Setup |
| 09:00 | Automating tasks with the Unix shell |
| 10:30 | Break |
| 12:00 | Lunch |
| 13:00 | Building programs with Python |
| 14:30 | Break |
| 16:00 | Wrap-up |
| 09:00 | Version control with Git |
| 10:30 | Break |
| 12:00 | Lunch |
| 13:00 | Building Programs with Python |
| 14:30 | Break |
| 16:00 | Wrap-up: Additional Resources |
| 16:30 | Post-workshop Survey |
We will use this collaborative document for chatting, taking notes, and sharing URLs and bits of code.
add, commit, ...status, diff, ...clone, pull, push, ...To participate in a Software Carpentry workshop, you will need access to the software described below. In addition, you will need an up-to-date web browser. We will use both terminal ("shell" or "command-line" interface) and GUI text editors at different times in the workshop, so pay careful attention to the text editors that are available for your system (several are listed below) and make sure that you are using at least one terminal and one GUI editor with which you are comfortable. Above all else, your GUI text editor must save documents as plain text (UTF-8 encoding).
We maintain a list of common issues that occur during installation as a reference for instructors that may be useful on the SWC Configuration Problems and Solutions wiki page.
Bash is a commonly-used shell that gives you the power to do simple tasks more quickly.
cmd and press [Enter])setx HOME "%USERPROFILE%"
SUCCESS: Specified value was saved.exit then pressing [Enter]This will provide you with both Git and Bash in the Git Bash program.
The default shell in all versions of macOS is Bash, 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.
The default shell is usually Bash, but if your
machine is set up differently you can run it by opening a
terminal and typing bash. There is no need to
install anything.
Git is a version control system that lets you track who made changes to what when and has options for easily updating a shared or public version of your code on github.com. You will need a supported web browser (current versions of Chrome, Firefox or Safari, or Internet Explorer version 9 or above).
You will need an account at github.com for parts of the Git lesson. Basic GitHub accounts are free. We encourage you to create a GitHub account if you don't have one already. Please consider what personal information you'd like to reveal. For example, you may want to review these instructions for keeping your email address private provided at GitHub.
Git should be installed on your computer as part of your Bash install (described above).
For OS X 10.9 and higher, install Git for Mac
by downloading and running the most recent "mavericks" installer from
this list.
After installing Git, there will not be anything in your /Applications folder,
as Git is a command line program.
For older versions of OS X (10.5-10.8) use the
most recent available installer labelled "snow-leopard"
available here.
If Git is not already available on your machine you can try to
install it via your distro's package manager. For Debian/Ubuntu run
sudo apt-get install git and for Fedora run
sudo dnf install git.
When you're writing code, it's nice to have a text editor that is
optimized for writing code, with features like automatic
color-coding of key words. These are often GUI editors that save
documents in plain text format, with several listed below for each
platform. In the terminal window, the default text editor on macOS and
Linux is usually set to Vim ("vi"), which is not famous for being
intuitive. If you accidentally find yourself stuck in it, try
typing the escape key, followed by :q! (colon, lower-case 'q',
exclamation mark), then hitting Return to return to the shell. Instructors
will often use the nano editor in the terminal window, which is a little
easier to use when just starting out.
nano is a basic terminal-based text editor and the default that instructors use in the workshop. To install it, download the Software Carpentry Windows installer and double click on the file to run it. This installer requires an active internet connection.
A number of GUI editors are available for Windows including Notepad++, Komodo Edit, and Sublime Text. Be aware that you must add its installation directory to your system path. Please ask your instructor to help you do this.
nano is a basic terminal-based text editor and the default that instructors use in the workshop. See the Git installation video tutorial for an example on how to open nano. It should be pre-installed in the Linux distribution that underlies the macOS.
A number of GUI editors are available for macOS including Text Wrangler (formerly BBEdit), Sublime Text, Atom, and Geany.
nano is a basic editor and the default that instructors use in the workshop. It should be pre-installed as a part of your Linux distribution.
A number of GUI editors are available for Linux including Gedit, Kate, Geany, Sublime Text, and Atom.
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 we recommend Anaconda, an all-in-one installer.
Regardless of how you choose to install it, please make sure you install Python version 3.x (e.g., 3.6 is fine).
We will teach Python using the Jupyter notebook, a programming environment that runs in a web browser. For this 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).
bash Anaconda3-and then press tab. The name of the file you just downloaded should appear. If it does not, navigate to the folder where you downloaded the file, for example with:
cd DownloadsThen, try again.
yes and
press enter to approve the license. Press enter to approve the
default location for the files. Type yes and
press enter to prepend Anaconda to your PATH
(this makes the Anaconda distribution the default Python).