Meso-computing and meso-data: the forgotten middle

Posted on Fri 28 August 2020 in rse • Tagged with mesocomputing, mesodata, rse

I've been working as a Research Software Engineer (RSE) at universities in the UK for many years now, across a variety of fields of research (particle physics, synthetic biology, cardiology, etc.) as both a user of computing services and as a provider of them. One thing that I've seen cropping …


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Melt your data with Pandas

Posted on Wed 27 May 2020 in python • Tagged with python, pandas

While trying to find some example data for a new course I'm writing, I came across a dataset in an unusual format and had to learn some new Pandas tricks to deal with it.

If you're new to pandas and would like to learn about it, you can access my …


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Making online teaching available

Posted on Tue 07 April 2020 in teaching • Tagged with teaching, python, online, workshop, youtube, kdenlive

As I've talked about a lot recently, we've been providing our software development and programming training as online workshops. It's been our plan all along to try to record these session to both have a corpus of material to help people we are consulting for but also for those times …


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More online teaching

Posted on Wed 01 April 2020 in teaching • Tagged with teaching, python, online, workshop

As I wrote about last week in Reflections on our first online programming workshop we have started doing our Bristol software training online. Since that post we have done two more classes (one advanced and one beginner) and so I wanted to update on the things we're learned.

Firstly, the …


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Creating a certificate authority in Ansible

Posted on Thu 26 March 2020 in ansible • Tagged with ansible

As part of my continuing work on Cluster in the Cloud, I had a situation where I needed to create a TLS certificate for a non-public host. These days for anything internet-facing with a DNS name I would normally just use Let's Encrypt but this was an internal host on …


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Reflections on our first online programming workshop

Posted on Mon 23 March 2020 in teaching • Tagged with teaching, python, online, workshop

Last Friday we ran the first online-version of our successful software engineering, data analysis and machine learning workshops. Previously, our workshops were 3-hour in-person events. Attendees would work at their own speed through self-guided web-based material. The workshop lead would present short sections of live-coding, while helpers would walk the …


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Strathmore Data Week 2019

Posted on Wed 17 July 2019 in teaching • Tagged with teaching, python, strathmore, kenya, jgi

As part of an ongoing collaboration betweek Strathmore Univeristy in Nairobi, Kenya and the Jean Golding Institute (JGI) at the University of Bristol, UK a delegation from Bristol visited Strathmore for a week of teaching and collaboration meetings.

The teaching was loosely modeled after the Data Week that the JGI …


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