Posted by a.pawlik on 31 May 2013 - 10:40am

By Aleksandra Pawlik.

This May, Software Carpentry once again went European with Jagiellonian University hosting the first bootcamp in Poland. There were 28 attendees: most of them postgraduate students and a few faculty members. They represented a range of disciplines from mathematics and theoretical physics to biology, genetics and medicine. 

The bootcamp was organised with the help of the PhD students' association represented by Damian Marchewka. The instructors were Karin Lagesen from the University of Oslo and myself. The local helpers were: Eryk Ciepiela, Maciej Czuchry, Klemens Noga from Cyfronet and Leszek Tarkowski from Infotraining. 

Since the bootcamp was widely advertised across the whole university, we decided to put together a curriculum at an introductory level including modules on shell, Make, Python programming and version control. This choice of modules aimed to accommodate the fact that the learners had background in a variety of research disciplines.

The pre-event questionnaire showed that several attendees already had prior experience in programming (using Fortran, C or Python). However, most of those who filled in the questionnaire either had very little or no experience at all. Many had not worked with shell before and hardly anyone had used version control. 

We struggled a bit with slow network and Git issues on Cygwin, but thanks to our helpers the problems got resolved fairly quickly. Once again I had an opportunity to learn that planning for the unplanned is a good idea when it comes to Software Carpentry bootcamps or, actually, any other events involving hands-on exercises with a set of tools.

At the end of the second day the attendees received certificates prepared by the Jagiellonian University PhD student association. The certificates stated that the attendee had completed the Software Carpentry Workshop, listed the total number of hours of training received and the modules that were covered. I am not sure whether it was due to the fact that the certificates were handed out at the end of the bootcamp, but the room was still full on the Sunday afternoon!

The overall feedback from the bootcamp was positive and a number of people asked about the dates of the future bootcamps in Krakow.

"This workshop is a really good idea. It covers stuff which is totally not present in university courses, especially in the Life Sciences."

- a quote from the bootcamp's anonymous feedback

(For more information about the Krakow bootcamp, see the Software Carpentry website.)