By Mike Jackson.

At last week's EGI Community Forum, we hosted a day of Software Carpentry boot camp highlights. These were taster sessions drawn from Software Carpentry's highly successful boot camps, which are for researchers who want to learn software development skills to do more in less time, and with less pain.

• Using version control to record provenance and collaborate more easily.
• Using testing to help ensure your software, and results, are correct.
• Data management using a NoSQL database to manage your data more easily.

We had 15-20 attendees for each session, mostly from a computer science or software development background, and in systems support or technical roles. The interests of the attendees were on the specific technologies covered in each session (Git, Python and nosetests, MongoDB) rather than the underlying concepts. The attendees viewed the sessions as very useful, one attendee commenting specifically that the hands-on, live coding approach of Software Carpentry was "very clear".

Next up is our Manchester boot camp later this week. We'll also be helping to deliver boot camps in Southampton and Bath, which are being organised by our fellows Robin Wilson and Alex Chartier, and at Oxford, over the next three months.