Software Carpentry started in 1997, when Greg Wilson and Brent Gorda ran their first three-day course at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It received a major boost in 2004, when the Python Software Foundation provided a grant to reorganize, update, and expand the material, and another in 2010 when Wilson left his position at the University of Toronto to teach Software Carpentry full-time, but really took off in 2012 thanks to backing from Mozilla and the Sloan Foundation.
Our mission is to teach researchers basic lab skills for scientific computing: the tools and techniques that will help them get more done in less time, and with less pain. Our core two-day curriculum includes:
- the Unix shell (and how to automate repetitive tasks);
- Python or R (and how to grow a program in a modular, testable way);
- Git and GitHub (and how to track and share work efficiently); and
- SQL (and the difference between structured and unstructured data).
We now have over 100 qualified instructors, who ran over 100 events for over 4300 scientists in a dozen countries in 2013. All of our lesson materials are freely reusable under the Creative Commons - Attribution license,
Make Things
Like all open source projects, we need your help to create new lessons and tools.
Join the Discussion
Along with our blog, we run several mailing lists and are active on Twitter.
Learn, Host, and Teach
Attend a bootcamp, host one, teach our material, or become an instructor.
Our Audience
Learn who we're trying to help, or read what past participants have to say about the impact our training has had on their research.
Our Supporters
Find out more about the sponsors who make Software Carpentry possible, and about the people who are part of our team.
Recommended Reading
If you are interested in our work, you may also enjoy these books and papers. Suggestions for additions are always welcome.
Software Carpentry is a project of the Mozilla Science Lab