Carpentry Connect Davis
Over the weekend of May 30 - June 1, Hao attended Carpentry Connect Davis. Here’s a short write-up of what he did
Jetstream/XSEDE
Jetstream/XSEDE is an NSF-funded cloud-environment for computing. The interface is a bit more friendly than typical university high-performance computing environments (IMO). You can select different levels of virtual machines, with hardware spec appropriate to your use case, and with different pre-installed programming languages and packages for whatever you need to do.
Followup Qs:
- how do you get large datasets onto a VM
- how to get access / funding / computer time
Binder
Binder is a tool for creating and sharing interactive coding environments through a web browser. The goal is to address the difficulties associated with reproducing a data analysis, namely:
- computer
- programming language
- packages and other dependencies
- code
- data
Binder works by using repo2docker to create a Docker image from a GitHub repo – this encapsulates all the files within the repo (including data and code), as well as the programming language and packages. The result is a link, that when clicked, launches a virtual machine with an instance of the image, and allows for testing out the code from within a web browser (without needing to install anything).
Followup Qs:
- sustainability of funding for continued operations
- potential uses in teaching or sharing of data journalism stories
Pathways for Community Involvement with the Carpentries
One of the discussion points among folks in attendance was: “What do you do after you attend a workshop?” There are several possible next steps:
- practice and build skills in a community (great if there are local groups, such as R-Ladies or similar)
- get involved with helping and instructing at future workshops (great if there’s a local group or folks who actively lead organization of workshops)
- become involved in other ways?
Followup Qs:
- what are best practices for finding or starting a local community? how do you acquire those skills?
- what can Carpentries do to help with this?
- how can different ways to become involved with Carpentries (e.g. lesson contributor, maintainer, mentor, helper, etc.) be better advertised or roles adjusted to improve community interaction?