The Carpentries

Over a decade with The Carpentries: workshops taught, instructors trained, and lessons and maintainers looked after.

The Carpentries is where I learned to teach. I went through Software Carpentry’s instructor training in 2014, taught my first workshop that June, and I’ve been involved in one way or another ever since (I wrote about what the Carpentries mean to me back in 2016). A lot of how I teach today, like live coding, comes from there.

• Instructor: I became a certified instructor in 2014 and have taught 15 Carpentries workshops, 12 for Software Carpentry, 2 for Data Carpentry, and 1 Carpentries workshop that mixed lessons from both. My first was a workshop for high school students at Rockefeller University.
• Lesson maintainer: in 2016, Harriet Dashnow and I took over maintaining the Software Carpentry R lesson, Programming with R. I’m also a co-author of 4 Software Carpentry lessons: Programming with R, The Unix Shell, Databases and SQL, and Version Control with Git.
• Instructor Trainer: I trained to become an Instructor Trainer in fall 2020, and then taught 3 instructor trainings (2021–2022), teaching new instructors how to teach.
• Maintainer Community Lead: I took over the role in November 2020, supporting the volunteers who maintain the lessons, revamping the Maintainer Onboarding curriculum, and teaching 3 onboarding sessions in 2021, before handing it over to Vini Salazar in June 2022.

I’ve written about Software Carpentry on the blog (posts tagged Software Carpentry), mostly about teaching workshops and assessing learners.

Workshops and trainings

Every Carpentries workshop, instructor training, and maintainer onboarding I’ve taught, newest first. Workshop names link to the workshop’s own website when it’s still up, and the full list of everything I’ve taught is on my Talks page.