In two weeks from today I’ll be in Stillwater, Oklahoma, teaching at my first Software Carpentry workshop. The topics will include learning the basics of a Unix shell, programming in python, version control and collaboration with git, and data management with SQL. Of these, perhaps SQL is my weakest area since I hardly ever have need of it, but it’s a good excuse to brush up! Don’t worry folks: I doubt that will be one of the topics I’ll be the lead instructor on. I’m very excited to teach any of the others. :D

Sharing the skillsets and tools with the researchers whose work can benefit the most from them is why I got involved with Software Carpentry, and I’m excited to finally start contributing to this effort. I plan to share my preparation and post-mortem (is debriefing a better word?), so watch this space in the coming weeks!

— david