Cameron Neylon

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Which is not to say that I am any good at software engineering, good
practice, or writing decent code. And you shouldn't take
[Greg](http://pyre.third-bit.com) to task for some of the dodgy demos
I've done over the past few months either. What he does need to take the
credit for is enabling me to go from someone who knew nothing at all
about software design, the management of software development or testing
to being able to talk about these things, ask some of the right
questions, and even begin to make some of my own judgements about code
quality in an amazingly short period of time. From someone who didn't
know how to execute a python script to someone who feels uncomfortable
working with services where I can't use a testing framework before
deploying software.

This was possible through the online component of the training
programme, called [Software Carpentry](http://software-carpentry.org/),
that Greg has been building, delivering and developing over the past
decade. This isn't a course in software engineering and it isn't built
for computer science undergraduates. It is a course focussed on taking
scientists who have done a little bit of tinkering or scripting and
giving them the tools, the literacy, and the knowledge to apply the best
of knowledge base of software engineering to building useful high
quality code that solves their problems.

Code and computational quality has never been a priority in science and
there is a strong argument that we are currently paying, and will
continue to pay a heavy price for that unless we sort out the
fundamentals of computational literacy and practices as these tools
become ubiquitous across the whole spread of scientific disciplines. We
teach people how to write up an experiment; but we don't teach them how
to document code. We teach people the importance of significant figures
but many computational scientists have never even heard of version
control. And we teach the importance of proper experimental controls but
never provide the basic training in testing and validating software.

Greg is seeking support to enable him to update Software Carpentry to
provide an online resource for the effective training of scientists in
basic computational literacy. It won't cost very much money; we're
talking a few hundred thousand dollars here. And the impact is
potentially both important and large. If you care about the training of
computational scientists; not computer scientists, but the people who
need, or could benefit from, some coding, data managements, or
processing in their day to day scientific work, and you have money then
I encourage you to contribute. If you know people or organizations with
money please encourage them to contribute. Like everything important,
especially anything to do with education and preparing for the future,
these things are tough to fund.

You can find Greg at his blog: <http://pyre.third-bit.com>

His description of what wants to do and what he needs to do it is at:
<http://pyre.third-bit.com/blog/archives/3400.html>

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- [Iterative software
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Image via Wikipedia  Which is not to say that I am any good at software engineering, good practice, or writing decent code. And you shouldn’t take Greg to task for some of the dodgy demos I’ve done over the past few months either.

Publicaciones de Rogue Scholar

Everything I know about software design I learned from Greg Wilson – and so should your students