CodeRefinery - The CodeRefinery project

Objectives

We are working with students, researchers, and research software engineers from all disciplines to advance FAIRness of software management and development practices so that research groups can collaboratively develop, review, discuss, test, share and reuse their codes.

Infrastructure services

Our code repository hosting service is open and free for all researchers based in Nordic universities and research institutes. Please contact us if you would like to use these services.

Training opportunities

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.

Membership with The Carpentries

Since November 2018, NeIC is a platinum partner to The Carpentries, an international project that comprises Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry, communities of instructors, trainers, maintainers, helpers, and supporters who share a mission to teach foundational computational and data science skills to researchers.

With this we have access to:

6 Carpentries workshops in the Nordics each year. The workshop fee is on us, only the instructor travel is on the host institution.
15 seats in the Carpentries instructor training each year.

Carpentry workshops last 2 days. Software Carpentry workshops include introductory lessons on Unix shell, version control with Git and programming in Python or R. Data Carpentry workshops are usually tailored to specific scientific disciplines. An overview of Carpentry curricula can be found here

Please get in touch if you would like to host a Carpentry workshop or become an instructor.

Level of Carpentry workshops

Carpentries workshops focus on creating a motivating and engaging environment for learners with no or little digital skills while our three day workshops are the next step. For beginners who don’t yet write code but want to get started, we highly recommend attending a Software Carpentry workshop.

CodeRefinery Workshops

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 also offer online workshops. Each online workshop focuses on one lesson from our training material and takes place during one or two 3-hour sessions in an online meeting room.

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.

Instructor training workshops

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.

Instructor training workshops take 2 days and cover this lesson material.

Level of Instructor training workshops

Learners should have some familiarity with good software development practices, especially in the context of scientific software, and be interested in sharing knowledge and teaching.

Other types of events

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!

Articles about CodeRefinery

“A FAIRer future”, Nature Physics 15, 728–730 (2019)
“Bättre datahantering gör forskning mer reproducerbar”, article in the Curie newsletter from the Swedish Research Council
CodeRefinery 2.0, PDC December 2018 newsletter and Titan.uio.no blog post
Teaching researchers to write better code, https://www.inthefieldstories.net/teaching-researchers-to-write-better-code/
Better software leads to better science, Nordforsk January 2018 news article
First Year of CodeRefinery, PDC December 2017 newsletter
CodeRefinery and the Red Queen’s race, CSC June 2017 blog post
CodeRefinery Workshops, PDC June 2017 newsletter
The CodeRefinery Project, PDC December 2016 newsletter

Presentations

The CodeRefinery newsletter is sent out every few months. Subscribers will be informed about upcoming workshops, hackathons and other events, as well as other interesting developments like new training material, community building activities and general project updates.

Here you can browse the archive of all previous newsletters. To sign up, please visit tinyletter.com/coderefinery.

The CodeRefinery project