The Hacker Within, University of California, Davis
- Spring 2016 Upcoming Topics
- pre-2016 Previous Topics
What:
A monthly meetup of researchers, scientists, and engineers who are always learning new tips and tricks to make their computational and data work flows better. Topics will be focused around scientific computing and data technologies. We call it “The Hacker Within” because we believe that everyone can find their inner computational skills. In these friendly sessions, peers at all levels of experience share topics useful to our work.
This meeting would be a great venue for introducing new libraries, showing off useful features of a scientific library or programming language you’re using, bringing up a computational problem you’re having, or demonstrating an analyses.
Who:
Anyone interested in software development best practices is welcome to come to our meetings.
Where:
Data Science Initiative Classroom
Third Floor Shields Library, Rm 360
UC Davis
When:
The second Thursday of the month at at 5:10pm. While the main talk should occupy less than an hour, the lightning talks and hacking session can go on until 7:00pm or later. See the upcoming topics list for the topic for this week.
How:
Participating is really easy.
- At 5:10pm, we gather and go through a round of introductions. New faces are always appearing!
- Next, a volunteer will give a tutorial or lead a discussion about a computational topic. This topic can be anything useful, new, or interesting to those who compute. It may be some new skill you have recently picked up in your research, a productivity tool you have recently learned to love, an overview of a useful library, or anything you feel we would enjoy learning.
- Finally, there will be a time for a handful of Lightning Talks, which are 5 minute blasts of information about a particular topic or question of interest to the group. Note that the lightning talk time is a good way to bring a question to the group. If you have a bug you need help with, here’s the place to ask many ears about it at once.
The Hacker Within relies on peer-driven teaching, so please volunteer to give one of these talks. To do so, just ping the listhost by email at thehackerwithin@ucdavis.edu. You will need to subscribe to the list first at lists.ucdavis.edu.
Why:
The tenets of scientific endeavor (e.g., data control, reproducibility, comprehensive documentation, and peer review) suffer in projects that fail to make use of current software development tools such as unit testing, version control, automated documentation, data managements, etc.
To avoid these pitfalls, this weekly meeting exists for sharing skills and best practices for computational scientific applications. This group is modeled after The Hacker Within, which began as a student organization at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is now reborn as a collection of such chapters around the world. Each of the chapters convenes a community of scientists, at all levels of their education and training, to share their knowledge and best practices in using computing to accomplish their work.
Support:
The Hacker Within is supported by the UCD Data Science Initiative.