This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.
We ran a two-day bootcamp at Mozilla's office in Toronto last week for people from local research hospitals. It seemed to go well: only 28 of the 37 who'd registered showed up, but with a couple of exceptions because of scheduling conflicts, everyone who showed up on day 1 came back on day 2. Many thanks to Dhavide Aruliah, Yele Bonilla, Mike Conley, Gabriel Devenyi, Fan Dong, and Blake Winton for helping out.
| Good | Bad |
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- New Tools
- Good teachers
- Good supply of paper/book references
- Useful simple bash scripts for analyzing text files
- Snacks: mmm...
- New plotting tools to replace Matlab
- Shell tools interesting
- Importance of version control
- Preview of IPython Notebook
- Stickies for feedback
- Good coverage basics (didn't jump right in to Python)
- Impressing upon us that everyone's research is relevant
- Digressions on learning psychology
| - Not enough testing covered
- Python installation problems
- Some examples didn't work
- More hands-on Python needed
- Digressions on learning psychology
- Numerical analysis parts too mathematical
- Need short overnight exercises to support learning
- More signposts what we're doing and why
- More exercises and application examples needed
- Not everything is placed on the Etherpad
- Getting working scripts not seamless
- Too damn cold
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