This July I co-instructed with Jennifer Shelton a Software Carpentry workshop at Stanford University, targeted to researchers with genomic or evolutionary datasets. Jennifer taught the shell (Bash) and version control with Git, while I taught the general programming language Python. I've been aware of the organization, which teaches software development and computational methods to scientists, since attending a workshop in 2012. Since then I've served as a helper at one workshop (troubleshooting individual learner's problems and helping catch them up with the rest of the class), and gone through the "accelerated", two day, instructor training at Michigan State University. After the Stanford workshop, I took part in new-instructor debriefing on August 4th, during which I mentioned that I had to greatly pare down the community-written lesson plan, python-novice-inflammation, to fit into the two half-day session we allotted it.

Karin and Tiffany, who were running the debriefing, asked me to send …