By Mike Jackson.

This week saw the first Software Carpentry boot camp to be held at The University of Edinburgh. The boot camp was organised by the Institute and EPCC as part of the PRACE Advanced Training Centre. We had 36 researchers from geosciences, astronomy, biology, statistics, chemistry and mathematics and based at 8 institutions across the UK.

Azalee Boestroem of STSCI and myself led the boot camp and we were ably assisted by my Institute colleagues Mario Antonoletti and Neil Chue Hong, one of our Agents, Aleksandra Pawlik, Nancy Giang of Dundee University (who'd attended our Newcastle boot camp), David Jones of the Climate Code Foundation and Luis Cebamanos and Lawrence Mitchell of EPCC. Mike Mineter of The University of Edinburgh and Norman Gray of The University of Glasgow also came along to help and to see what a boot camp is like, with a view to running boot camps for the physics and geosciences communities.

The attendees' comments on the workshop were positive, especially with respect to our coverage of version control and Python, and the work of the helpers. As always there were valuable suggestions for future improvements, notably about achieving a good balance between going too fast and going too slow, and having to queue for coffee!

In the New Year, the Institute's Steve Crouch will be heading to Europe to help present boot camps in Munich and Tuebingen.

For more news on our involvement in Software Carpentry or if you want to get involved as a helper, instructor or organiser, check out our Software Carpentry web page or contact us.