Instructors: Damien Irving

What: The mission of the Software Carpentry project is to help scientists be more productive by teaching them basic computing skills. Scientists often spend much of their time wrestling with software, but most are self-taught programmers. As a result, they spend hours doing things that should take minutes, reinvent a lot of wheels, and still don't know if their results are reliable. To tackle this problem, Software Carpentry runs two-day bootcamps at dozens of sites around the world. For example, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, MIT, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute all hosted bootcamps in 2013. To coincide with the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (AMOS) national conference, AMOS and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science (CoECSS) are proud to be teaming up to bring the first ever bootcamp to Hobart.

Who: The Hobart bootcamp is aimed at postgraduate students (including honours) and other research scientists working in the AMOS sciences (i.e. meteorology, climatoloogy, oceanography, glaciology) who are familiar with basic programming concepts like loops, conditionals, arrays, and functions, but need help to translate this knowledge into practical tools to help them work more productively.

Requirements: Participants are asked to bring their laptop with some specific software packages installed (the Bash Shell, a text editor, Git, and Python/Anaconda; set Setup instructions below). If you don't have a laptop, that's completely fine. We'll pair you up with someone who does.

Participants are also asked to fill out a short questionnaire about their previous programming experience. The responses will be used to tailor the teaching material to the knowledge base of the audience.

Registration: Participants can register at the AMOS conference website at the same time as registering for the conference itself ($120.00 for full fee and $90.00 for students). At the registration site it is possible to register for the bootcamp alone (i.e. and not the conference as well), however just note that the bootcamp is only open to people working in the AMOS sciences. Registrations for the bootcamp will close on 31 December 2013 or when the venue capacity (50 people) has been reached, whichever comes first. Note that it is not anticipated that people who attended the AMOS/CoECSS bootcamp at the University of Melbourne in February 2013 will also attend this one, as the teaching content will be very similar.

Contact: Please mail d.irving@student.unimelb.edu.au for more information.

Topics

The following is an outline of what will be covered at the bootcamp. For a detailed schedule of the timing of each session (i.e. what time morning tea and lunch will be, etc) see the Etherpad that has been setup for communications during the bootcamp.

Pre-bootcamp homework: Shell basics
Most bootcamps start with an introduction to the shell, however the survey responses indicate that many of the Hobart attendees already understand the basics. As such, all participants should read over the summary of the shell teaching material prior to the bootcamp. If the contents of any of the six sections of that summary don't look familiar, take a few minutes to read the corresponding lesson (indicated in brackets) and bring yourself up to speed, as the shell lessons won't be covered at the Hobart bootcamp.

Monday (Feb 10) morning: Python basics
The key to being a proficient programmer is solid fundamentals. In this session you'll learn the basics of the Python programming language, including how to import libraries/modules, perform simple array operations, create basic plots, and define proper functions.

Monday (Feb 10) afternoon: Programming like a programmer
Have you ever wondered how professional programmers write code? In this session you'll learn the common tricks of the trade, from defensive programming, error handling and debugging, to unit testing and the development of command line programs.

Tuesday (Feb 11) morning: Version control
Do you work in a small research team that shares code? Do you struggle to keep track of multiple versions of the same code? Would you like an easier way to backup your work? This session will teach you everything you need to know about git, a version control system that can solve all these problems and more.

Tuesday (Feb 11) afternoon: Data management & number crunching
Observational networks and numerical models are continually improving their temporal and spatial resolution, which means AMOS scientists are forever dealing with more and more data. This session will cover the core metadata and data provenance principles that should be adhered to in all data intensive research, in addition to an introduction to fundamental numerical programming concepts like matrix programming and floating point arithmetic. A guest presenter from the IMOS eMarine Information Infrastructure will also drop by to talk about how they manage their data, and how you can use your new skills in the shell, Python and version control to access it.

Setup

Please follow the installation instructions for your operating system (i.e. Windows, Mac OS X or Linux). It is expected that participants will have successfully installed all the required packages prior to arriving at the bootcamp. If you are having trouble with any of the installations, please contact us at the email address listed above.

Reference Guides

• The Unix Shell
• Python