Thanks to Robyn Drinkwater from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh for this guest post about the Software Carpentry Bootcamp we ran with CGR Liverpool a couple of weeks ago. This piece was first published on Botanics Stories, the RBGE blog.
Programming is becoming an increasingly useful skill as it can aid in the execution of large, repetitive tasks, and in running analyses of large data sets. Four staff from RBGE recently attended a workshop set up by GARNet and the University of Liverpool’s Centre for Genomic Research along with Software Carpentry, to help them learn and improve their use of some simple tools and programming.
During the workshop they explored the principles of good programming, which can be applied to any programming language, the use of the Command Line, version control using Git and GitHub, and Python, a widely used programming language, which can be used for data manipulation, as well as other programming tasks.
The workshop led us from first principles through each tool, building our understanding of how it works, and showing us examples of how it could be used. During the workshop we started to explore how we could use these tools to look at our own data, and for some of us, we were still seeing what we could do on the train home!
The next step for all of us is to keep practicing and looking at how we can use Python, Git and the Command Line in our work and keep building on the good foundation the bootcamp gave us.
Tweets from participants and organisers of the event have all been brought together by the organisers:
Image credit: Charis Cook
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