2023-siam.md

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CodeRefinery (SIAM CSE23)

What We Learned from Teaching Software Engineering Practices to Students and Researchers in Nordics and Beyond

Radovan Bast (UiT The Arctic University of Norway)

 

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FAIR principles and software

Researchers need to navigate many tools and concepts.

.cite[(c) Scriberia for The Turing Way, CC-BY]

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.cite[Heidi Seibold, CC-BY 4.0, https://twitter.com/HeidiBaya/status/1579385587865649153]

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Team and project: coderefinery.org

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• Since 2016, now phase 3 until 2025
• Over 2000 persons trained
• Over 30 instructors/speakers
• Over 100 exercise leads
• Innovative teaching methods
• Working in public
• Lesson material
• Video recordings
• Manuals
• Training network
• Community

]

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Course portfolio: it's all CC-BY

Typical format: 6 half-days, twice per year, online, free, live-streamed, recorded, archived asynchronous Q&A in collaborative document .left-column50[

• Version control
• Collaboration using Git
• Testing
• Documentation
• Notebooks
• Modular code development
• Reproducible research
• Software licensing
• How to share and publish code
• How to organize a code project
• ... ]

.right-column50[ Next workshop March 21-23 and 28-30, 2023, register here: https://coderefinery.github.io/2023-03-21-workshop/

Lessons and recordings: https://coderefinery.org/lessons/ ]

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Participating as a learner

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.cite[(c) Samantha Wittke]

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Workshop preparation

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.cite[(c) Samantha Wittke]

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Pre-workshop survey: Who comes to our workshops?

• https://github.com/coderefinery/pre-workshop-survey
• https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2671578

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Pre-workshop survey: Programming languages

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Post-workshop survey: impact on usage of tools

• https://github.com/coderefinery/post-workshop-survey
• https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2671576

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Post-workshop survey: impact on code quality and collaboration

• 284 answers

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Participating as an organization

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.cite[(c) Samantha Wittke]

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What we have learned: .emph[Teaching together and learning together]

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.cite[R. Darst "The Future of Teaching" (text, video)]

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R. Darst's streaming setup during "Python for Scientific Computing".

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Lesson design

• Design lessons to .emph[learners' needs] not to what instructors find cool
• Public-first

Tech

• Ask and answer questions using collaborative document
• Dedicate time to set up high-quality screen share
• Screen share: .emph[portrait mode, not landscape]

Privacy

• Make it impossible for audience to appear in voice or picture
• We can publish recordings sooner
• Recordings are most viewed on the same day

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Community and coordination

• .emph[Coordination effort] starts to outweigh lesson preparation and teaching
• The importance of .emph[communicating value to organizations]
• .emph[Outreach and marketing] takes time and work
• Volunteer retention and building long lasting relationships takes effort

Follow-up

• Need for mentor networks

Funding and reporting

• Not everybody needs to be active during a course: make it easy for people to drop by for the parts they are interested in
• Need to adapt how we measure participation

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Where to start and how to progress? Code review

.quote["but the code is not ready"]

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.emph[Good enough practices] that are used better than perfect practices not applied

• Too many commits better than too few commits
• One branch better than no branches

Instead of "good for others": ".emph[good for your future you] and as side effect good for others"

• Try a ReproHack: try to reproduce published work
• Learn how to share work inside your group: "which versions have you used?"
• Talk about licenses

Mentoring and support

• Code review and feedback
• Code reading sessions
• Research software engineers
• .emph[Office hours]

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There are other projects in this space

Great overview by the INTERSECT project (INnovative Training Enabled by a Research Software Engineering Community of Trainers)

• Collection of RSE training material, workshops, and resources: https://intersect-training.org/training-links/

How can project collaborate across funding borders?

• Cross-advertise
• Link to material
• We would like to encourage our project members to help out at other workshops and vice versa
• Teach together

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Future

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• Towards being a non-profit or closer to a legal entity so that we can participate in funding applications

• More collaboration with similar projects

• Research groups can send their students and helpers to us instead of creating isolated material

• Easier to participate as individual or organization, even short-term

• Offer value for volunteers ]

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License and credit: CC-BY

Collaborators and inspiration

• Richard Darst (design of the current workshop streaming format, developed many novel teaching techniques that we use)
• Samantha Wittke (graphics explaining the concepts, developed workshop on-boarding scheme)
• Matias Jääskeläinen (workshop coordination)
• CodeRefinery team
• Aalto RSE group
• Nordic-RSE

Credits to external references

• The Turing Way (FAIR image)
• H. Seibold ("6 helpful steps for reproducible research" image)
• Other images: Jet pilot: public domain. Captain and first officer: CC0. ATC tower: CC BY 2.0 (Peter R. Miller).

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How you or your organization can participate

.emph[Next workshop] March 21-23 and 28-30, 2023, register here: https://coderefinery.github.io/2023-03-21-workshop/

• Use our material and give feedback
• Send one or more exercise teams
• Join as observer to see how we teach and organize
• Co-organize, co-create, co-teach with us

News, support, and social media

• Chat: https://coderefinery.zulipchat.com
• Blog: https://coderefinery.org/blog/
• Newsletter: https://tinyletter.com/coderefinery
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/coderefine
• Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@coderefinery
• Support: support@coderefinery.org