The Hacker Within, Swinburne

What:

Swinburne Hacker Within is a 1.5 hour weekly informal meetup for Swinburne PhD students, technical staff and researchers at all levels and from all disciplines. It’s about learning new web-skills, learning new tools, gaining experience with programming languages, trouble shooting existing problems, and helping one another to create innovative research tools and projects to enhance your own research (or other interests). It’s mainly about having fun, sharing ideas, and finding your hacker within.

No previous programming/hacking experience is necessary. Each session will be based around a theme and may include a short talk or demonstration to generate ideas. Some sessions may include a guided tutorial, if not there will always be an “expert” on hand to help you get started. Participants are welcome to follow along, or work independently or in groups on their on their own projects. Participants are encouraged to share ideas and skills, and propose topics for future sessions.

Initial sessions will focus on data visualisation tools for research, creating research websites and blogs, and learning about software repositories like GitHub and useful tools to make programming easier, e.g. iPython Notebook. More advanced topics may be thrown in from time to time.

Organiser: Arna Karick @drarnakarick. Feel free to contact me via Twitter.

Where & When:

We are taking a short break from Swinburne Hacker Within

In the meantime we recommend checking out the previous and upcoming tutorials and discussions and visiting the other Hacker Within websites: Berkeley, Illinois, and Wisconsin.

Who:

PhDs and researchers at all levels from all disciplines - social sciences, biosciences, engineering, astronomy, business, design, everyone!. Anyone interested in learing how to use GitHub to write and share code, create data visualisations from research data, learn Python (iPython Notebooks), Julia, web design (HTML, CSS), CartoDB mapping, D3js and TimelineJS visualisations, turning spreasheets into databases and kickstarting new projects for research or outreach.

First time hackers need not be afraid! We will help set up laptops. You will be creating websites and small projects in no time.

What to bring:

Participating is really easy. Just bring your:

If you have data you want to work on then bring that too.

How:

The Hacker Within relies on peer-driven teaching, so please feel free volunteer to lead a topic or discussion. If you have any other questions about the meetup please email the organiser.

Click here for useful links, blogs to follow and examples

Background:

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 development tools such as unit testing, version control, automated documentation, and others.

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 researchers, at all levels of their education and training, to share their knowledge and best practices in using computing to accomplish their work.