Gregory V. Wilson

About

Graduate Students

Software Carpentry

Computers are as important to modern science as telescopes and test tubes. From analyzing climate data to modeling the internals of cells, they allow scientists to study problems that are too big, too small, too fast, too slow, too expensive, or too dangerous to tackle in the lab. Unfortunately, most scientists are never taught how to use computers effectively. After a generic first-year programming course, and possibly a numerical methods or statistics course later on, graduate students and working scientists are expected to figure out for themselves own how to build, validate, maintain, and share complex programs. This is about as fair as teaching someone arithmetic and then expecting them to figure out calculus on their own, and about as likely to succeed.

It doesn't have to be like this. Since 1997, the Software Carpentry course has taught scientists the concepts and skills they need to use computers more effectively in their research. This training has consistently had an immediate impact on participants' productivity by making their current work less onerous, and new kinds of work feasible. The materials, which are available under an open license, have been viewed by over 140,000 people from 70 countries, and have been used at Cal Tech, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and other universities, labs, and companies around the world.

I am currently seeking support to update and extend this course. If you would like to help, please contact me.

Basie

Basie is a web-based software project forge that integrates all the tools developers need to work effectively in small teams. Built by and for students, it is simple enough to master in ten minutes, but powerful enough to support long-lived distributed projects, and is freely distributed under an open source license. Its features include:

• Multiple projects per forge
• Role-based access control and pluggable user account management
• Subversion repository browser
• Cross-component search
• Per-project wiki with standard WikiCreole syntax
• A simple ticketing system
• Web-based administration
• REST API for web services
• Graphical dashboard showing project statistics and history
• IRC integration

UCOSP

Software development is no longer bound by time zones or national borders. Projects of all kinds--—academic, commercial, and open source—--may have their GUI designers in Boston, their database team in Bangalore, and their testers in Budapest and Buenos Aires. Working effectively in such teams is challenging: it requires strong communication skills, and makes proper use of coordination tools such as version control and ticketing systems more important than ever. But it is also an opportunity for students to build ties with peers across the country and around the world, and for instructors to breathe new life into old courses.

Since September 2008, undergraduates from several universities in Canada and the US have been taking part in joint capstone projects in order to learn first-hand what distributed development is like. Each team has students from two or three schools, and uses a mix of agile and open source processes under the supervision of a faculty or industry lead. Schools and projects that have taken part to date include:

Books

Papers