CodeRefinery improves science by providing training and infrastructure for researchers, who often need to use computational tools but have little training in tools beyond basic programming. Our support allows research to be more reproducible, open, and efficient and thus promotes the goals of open science and FAIR data management - in addition to making the lives of countless researchers better, since they learn the tools needed to do their work with less trouble.
We are most known for our practical-level workshop about base-level practices of software development tools for researchers. We are also known for our unique and engaging online teaching style, and are building a community around this type of shared teaching.
Through our spin-off project Nordic-RSE, we serve as a hub for research software engineers in the Nordic countries, namely in Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Estonia. Research Software Engineers are basically the professional level of what we teach, and the two-way collaboration is very productive.
We are a community project seeking volunteers to sustain what we have accomplished in the previous phases.
We are basically intermediate-level Carpentries lessons and would like to work more closely with The Carpentries. Our in-person workshops are basically "Carpentries-style", though our online workshops have adopted our own unique style. Our overall philosophy is similar. Our target audience is learners who already have some experience with programming and would like to develop software in a more efficient and sustainable way. We believe that for many learners we can offer a good second step after their Carpentries workshop.
We would like to work more closely with The Carpentries and offer our lessons as intermediate-level carpentries. If you are reading this, please get in touch.
We develop and maintain training material on software best practices for researchers that already write code. Our material addresses all academic disciplines and tries to be as programming language-independent as possible.
We offer training opportunities:
Until 2025 we provided a code repository hosting service that is open and free for all researchers based in national universities and research institutes from Nordic countries. This service is currently moving to DeiC, but will continue to be available for all Nordics.
We offer training opportunities to researchers from Nordic research groups and projects to learn basic-to-advanced research computing skills and become confident in using state-of-the-art tools and practices from modern collaborative software engineering.
The key objective of CodeRefinery workshop is to grow researchers' software best practices skills to facilitate open and reproducible research.
In-person workshops - We offer three-day workshops that focus on methods to build modular, reusable, maintainable, sustainable, reproducible, testable, and robust software. These workshops are based on training material we develop and maintain.
Online workshops - Since April 2020, we offer both "full-package" workshops by 6 half-days over 2 weeks with the same contents as 2-day in-person workshop (training material) and shorter workshops focusing on one or a limited number of lessons.
Requesting a workshop - Would you like to host a CodeRefinery workshop at your home institution? Get in touch if this sounds interesting! Note that even though CodeRefinery is a Nordic project, we are interested in giving workshops also outside the Nordics and are able to do so provided that funding for travel and accommodation can be covered.
Information for local organizers - We have prepared a list of practical requirements.
Level of CodeRefinery workshops - For CodeRefinery workshop, it is assumed that participants already write code for their research but no expertise is required. Some experience in navigating the file tree and editing files in a terminal session is recommended. Our workshops are attended by MSc and PhD students, postdocs, researchers and more senior staff from a wide range of scientific backgrounds and with different programming experiences.
One purpose of our Instructor training workshops is to train CodeRefinery instructors, but being (or becoming) a CodeRefinery instructor is not required. With the workshops we also aim at building partnerships with research software engineers and researchers who are willing to lead skills' transfer within their local communities in the Nordics.
We have organized hackathons, get-together events and shorter workshops customized for individual research groups. Regularly we also host online Open House events where CodeRefinery instructors together with a wider community of interested people work in sprints on topics ranging from lesson development to website updates.
We're always interested in new collaborations, so if you would like to co-organize an event with us or suggest a new type of event, don't hesitate to get in touch!