Teaching researchers basic programming skills and best practices, including task automation, structured code design and testing, version control and data structuring

Software Carpentry is an international initiative aimed at teaching researchers (which have no or minimal prior knowledge in IT) software development skills in order to help them improve or speed up their research. Founded in 1998, it runs short, intensive workshops that cover essential software development skills needed for research. The Software Carpentry Foundation was created in October 2014 to act as a governing body for the initiative, and is a sister foundation to Data Carpentry.

Software Carpentry workshops cover four core topics:

  • task automation using command line tools,
  • structured code design and development with unit testing, so that scientists produce code that is readable, testable, sustainable and reusable (demonstrated using either Python or R),
  • version control,
  • introduction to structuring data using SQL.

We support the Software Carpentry mission through our work for the Software Sustainability Institute, which is the official Software Carpentry representative in the UK.