CodeRefinery white paper

Purpose:

• Announce CodeRefinery to a wider world
• especially EuroCC/EuroHPC network
• Can be spread to other networks, including industrial/public sectors
• Show why CR material is uniquely well suited to intermediate-level software engineering skills for researchers and engineers across many disciplines
• Open people's eyes that these skills are not sufficiently well taught today

Structure:

• Executive summary
• Introduction
  • importance of software engineering skills across domains
    • Carpentries address the basics, but more needed
      • link to Greg's papers, "good enough …"
    • where is the intermediate-to-advanced level material?
    • Digital Compass reference
    • HPC usage requires more than the basics
• unique character of CodeRefinery material
  - follows Carpentries:
  - open source
  - large community of developers, connected via Zulip, Nordic-RSE and NordicHPC
  - hands-on, interactive
  - goes beyond carpentries: biannual massive online workshops
  - not taught in university curricula
  - not about programming itself (programming is a prerequisite)
  - teaches tools and best practices to researchers/engineers who already write code
  - lessons learned in CodeRefinery
  - best practices in online teaching
  - how to scale up to massive online workshops
  - results from CR surveys, both registration-time questions, workshop feedback and long-term follow-up questions
• anyone can teach CR workshops
  • two instructor training lessons and one ENCCS "best practices in HPC training"
  • join the community!
  • EuroCC could adopt CodeRefinery in their training portfolios, or recommend CR as prerequisite material
  • CR lessons are mature and can be included in learning paths for many different professions
• outlook
  • increased digitalisation will require increasing level of digital competence across sectors
  • open source and public lessons which can be taught by anyone, and are suitable also for self-learning, can fill the gap in intermediate level training