I just finished up my stint as a helper at Software Carpentry's Women in Science and Engineering boot camp, also known as WiSE. The event was held at Microsoft's space in Cambridge Center near Boston from June 24 - 25.

A couple years ago, while I was in physics graduate school, I found out about an organization called Software Carpentry. My advisor sent me a Nature article about poor software practices in science and it quoted Greg Wilson, the founder of Software Carpentry. Around the same time, I also heard that Software Carpentry was running an online class to teach scientists software skills. I signed up and really enjoyed the class -- which covered Python, shell, version control, object oriented programming, regular expressions, testing, and databases.

This past weekend, I participated in Hack for Western Mass as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking.¹ This was my first hackathon and initially I was skeptical that you could accomplish much of anything with strangers during a weekend. But I turned out be wrong.