# CodeRefinery newsletter ## Feb 26 Hei, we have a couple of news from the CodeRefinery project to share with you: Next CodeRefinery workshop in March -------------------------- Our next CodeRefinery tools workshop (online) will take place March 17-19 and 24-26 2026, event page and registration: https://coderefinery.github.io/2026-03-17-workshop/ Some locations offer local classrooms to meetup and learn together for part or the whole workshop. You can find them on our event page: https://coderefinery.github.io/2026-03-17-workshop/#local-exercise-groups If you would like to help us advertise the workshop, please find some announcement texts to copy on our events communication page: https://coderefinery.github.io/2026-03-17-workshop/communication/ and a poster: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/coderefinery/posters/refs/heads/main/2026_spring_workshop/workshop_poster_march25_CET.png We will work on our lesson materials and installation instructions during 2 further sessions in the near future: - Tue 10.2 13 CET - Wed 18.2 11 CET Contact support@coderefinery.org or join our Zulip chat (https://coderefinery.zulipchat.com) if you would like to join and support us. Project plan ------------ CodeRefinery phase 4 now also has a public project plan outlining our work until mid 2028: https://coderefinery.org/about/reports/phase-4-project-plan.pdf Many of the activities mentioned there have already started, some will be starting later. If you are interested in joining any activities or would like to learn more, contact support@coderefinery.org. Ambassador program ------------------ Do you like what we do and would like to help spread the word to your community? Join our ambassador mailing list and +- monthly meetings (next on March 30): https://coderefinery.org/join/individuals/#coderefinery-ambassador Nordic-RSE conference --------------------- If you want to meet CodeRefinery project members and other research software enthusiasts, consider visiting the Nordic-RSE (research software engineers) conference which will take place on June 9-10 2026 in Tromsø, Norway. More info will soon come to Nordic-RSE conference website: https://nordic-rse.org/nrse2026/ Your Voice Matters: Participate in the international RSE Survey! --------------------------------- Are you involved in Research Software Engineering or a related role? We want to hear from you! Take a few minutes to fill out the international RSE survey to help us capture the state of RSE globally. Your insights are crucial in shaping the future of our field and advocating for the recognition and support of RSE professionals. Make your voice count! Take the survey here: https://softwaresaved.limequery.com/611257?lang=en (you may also take the survey in German,Spanish or French, available via this blogpost: https://www.software.ac.uk/news/2026-international-rse-survey) That's all for now. Looking forward to seeing you at one of our events or on chat (https://coderefinery.zulipchat.com)! On behalf of the CodeRefinery team, Samantha Wittke CodeRefinery4 project manager ----- --- ## July 25 Hei, we have a couple of news from the CodeRefinery project to share with you: Next CodeRefinery workshop -------------------------- Our next CodeRefinery tools workshop (online) will take place Sep 9-11 at 11-15.30 CEST and Sep 17, 24, Oct 1, 8, 15, 22, 2025, 12–14.30 CEST: https://coderefinery.github.io/2025-09-09-workshop/ Slightly new format, starting later in the day to accommodate our friends in Iceland and giving more time to "week 2" topics to bring back exercises and support "choose your own adventure". Registration will open soon! Some locations offer local classrooms to meetup and learn together for part or the whole workshop. You can find them on our event page: https://coderefinery.github.io/2025-09-09-workshop/#local-exercise-groups If you would like to help us advertize the workshop, please find some announcement texts to copy on our events communication page: https://coderefinery.github.io/2025-09-09-workshop/communication/ Community elected steering group member ---------------------------------------- We are looking for volunteers to join our steering group representing the community. More info: https://hackmd.io/@coderefinery/community-elected-sg CodeRefinery GitLab to be continued by DeIC -------------------------------------------- In September 2025 the CodeRefinery GitLab instance will move from being managed by CodeRefinery to the Danish e-Infrastructure Consortium (who maintain it since 2017). The GitLab instance will continue to be available for all researchers in the Nordics. We will soon inform about the new URL (we will maintain a forward for many months to come) and support address. We joined the STARS Forum! -------------------------- We are now part of the Forum for Skills and Training for Research Software by the Research Software Alliance: https://www.researchsoft.org/stars-forum/ Looking forward to getting to know and collaborating with all the awesome RSE training initiatives out there! Nordic-RSE conference --------------------- The Nordic-RSE (research software engineers) conference took place May 20-21, 2025 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Many CodeRefinery community members were present there. Read the conference blog post: https://nordic-rse.org/blog/nrse-conference-report/ Ambassador program ------------------ Do you like what we do and would like to help spread the word to your community? Join our ambassador mailing list and +- monthly meetings (next on Aug 25): https://coderefinery.org/join/individuals/#coderefinery-ambassador That's all for now. Looking forward to seeing you at one of our events or on chat (https://coderefinery.zulipchat.com)! On behalf of the CodeRefinery team, Samantha Wittke CodeRefinery4 project manager ## Feb 25 Subject: CodeRefinery newsletter February 2025 dear all, we have a couple of good news from the CodeRefinery project to share with you. Phase 4 approved ---------------- Our proposal for phase 4 of the project (2025 - 2028) got approved few days ago. We will continue to offer online workshops in the now familiar format (streamed lectures, exercises, bring-your-own-classroom model, co-teaching). We will also experiment with asynchronous learning and self-paced learning modules. Our travel budget is increased compared to previous phases, and we are looking forward to being able to present the project at more conferences and events and to engage with more communities and start new collaborations. We are also in the process of establishing a long-term support for the GitLab service which we operate since many years. Social media ------------ We have left X/Twitter and are now active on Mastodon, LinkedIn, and Bluesky: - Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@coderefinery - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/coderefinery-research-software-development - Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/coderefinery.bsky.social Next CodeRefinery workshop -------------------------- Our next CodeRefinery tools workshop (online) will take place March 25-27 and April 1-3, 2025: https://coderefinery.github.io/2025-03-25-workshop/ You can help us advertise with a workshop poster: https://github.com/coderefinery/posters/tree/main/2025_spring_workshop Monthly Open House events ------------------------- We have restarted our almost-monthly Open House events. In January we had an interesting discussion about how an advanced Git lesson could look like: - Open house on "git masterclass": https://coderefinery.org/blog/open-house-git-masterclass/ Nordic-RSE conference --------------------- The Nordic-RSE (research software engineers) conference will take place May 20-21, 2025 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Many CodeRefinery community members will be present there. The registration and call for contributions are open: - https://nordic-rse.org/nrse2025/ Ambassador program ------------------ Do you like what we do and would like to help spread the word to your community? Join our ambassador mailing list: https://coderefinery.org/join/individuals/#coderefinery-ambassador That's all for now. Looking forward to seeing you at one of our events and on chat! On behalf of the CodeRefinery team, Radovan Bast and Samantha Wittke --- # CodeRefinery newsletter January 2023 ## Next workshop in March Our next CodeRefinery workshop will take place in March 21-30, 2023 and the registration is open: https://coderefinery.github.io/2023-03-21-workshop/ We have simplified the registration based on lessons learned from our past workshop. Our goal is to make it easier and more flexible to register and to form teams. Everyone can attend by following the stream on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/coderefinery/about. Please share the workshop page to your friends! We are happy to welcome people with basic experience in Git or other topics to act as helpers during the workshop! Gather some friends to join as a team, reserve a meeting room and get some snacks! However you choose to join, we wish you a happy workshop! ## Greetings from NeIC All-Hands Meeting 2023 Some CodeRefinery team members met at the annual NeIC All-Hands Meeting 2023, held in Kvitfjell, Norway. Other participants were from other projects funded by NeIC. We had a change to present CodeRefinery and to get to know other projects. The atmosphere at the event was both relaxed and excited and the CodeRefinery attendees want to thank the organisers one more time! ![](https://i.imgur.com/V876eed.jpg) Photo by @MatiasJJ ## Self-learning material Our goal is to make good learning material more visible: - CodeRefinery lessons work also as standalone learning material: https://coderefinery.org/lessons/. They focus on collaboration an reproducability in software development. - Python for Scientific Computing materials provide good basics on Python and suit well for beginners: https://aaltoscicomp.github.io/python-for-scicomp/ - CSC - IT Center for Science in Finland offers various training material that focuses on working on CSC supercomputers, but also general topics like data science: https://csc.fi/web/guest/oppimateriaalit - ENCCS - The Swedish EuroCC Hub for High-Performance Computing has a collection of training materials containing wide selection of research software engineering topics: https://enccs.se/lessons/ - NRIS - Norwegian Research Infrastructure Services provides good basics on UNIX and HPC for beginners: https://training.pages.sigma2.no/tutorials/unix-for-hpc/index.html & https://training.pages.sigma2.no/tutorials/hpc-intro/index.html The next few weeks our focus is on the March workshops but also on simplifying onboarding and improving our outreach. Looking forward to seeing you at one of our upcoming events! *Best regards, CodeRefinery* --- --- tags: newsletter --- # CodeRefinery newsletter October 2021 Dear readers, Welcome to the sixth CodeRefinery newsletter! It has been over a year since the last newsletter was sent. Hope you are all doing well and enjoying the re-opened society where it is applicable. ## CodeRefinery project continues as "Sustainability Phase" First of all, let us share a brilliant news: Our current major funder, Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC) chose CodeRefinery (sustainability phase) as one of the 3 projects to fund among the 11 excellent applications: https://neic.no/news/2021/10/01/2021-open-call-results/ We are so proud of it and thank all of you who contributed to making our application successful 😊 In this sustainability phase, we will be shifting the project to community-based collaboration by both in-kind contributions and voluntary participations by enthusiasts. ## Python for Scientific Computing (25-28 Oct): a showcase of our new vision In fact, ["Python for Scientific Computing (25-28 Oct)"](https://scicomp.aalto.fi/training/scip/python-for-scicomp/) is showcasing our vision of shared-teaching across institutions to reach as many learners as possible. The course is to be streamed via [CodeRefinery's channel on Twitch.tv](https://www.twitch.tv/coderefinery), so no need for sign-up, just hop-in and out any time, while any learners can ask questions in an online shared note during the course so that they can be answered more or less on time. It is also good to team up locally to work on exercise together, either in-person or with own video-conference room. The workshop has gotten much attention so far, and although it is not necessary to register, still we weceived >400 registrations in total. ## Join in and build further the CodeRefinery community together! To make this community more open and build it further, we started from the August community calls where all of those interested are welcome to join to discuss topics for building and developing further CodeRefinery community. You can see the minutes of the past calls at https://coderefinery.org/about/meeting-minutes/. From November, we will be having the community calls on monthly basis. Schedule of upcoming calls will be posted at on [our website](https://coderefinery.org), [twitter](https://twitter.com/coderefine) and via [Zulip](https://coderefinery.zulipchat.com/#). Please join in community calls as well as join in CodeRefinery’s Zulip for asynchronous and open communication! ## Plan for renewal of privacy policy and communication platforms One thing we want to improve in future is to make it easier to stay informed about the many events and workshops we organize and co-organize, while at the same time giving everybody full control over what notifications to receive and what data to share with us. GDPR is very important to us. However, we might have been over-careful with this in the past and we might have missed opportunities informing the community about events of interest. In future we might move this newsletter to a different platform (and then inform you and let you opt-in into the new platform) but we haven't concluded on the ideal solution yet. Until then we keep the privacy policy (https://coderefinery.org/privacy-policy/) and only modify the end date of storing registration data of the workshop participants during 2020 and 2021 in the NeIC's registration system, based on Indico, to December 2024. Best regards, CodeRefinery --- # CodeRefinery newsletter October 2020 ###### tags: `newsletter` Dear reader, Welcome to the fifth CodeRefinery newsletter! The pandemic situation is still persistent and unfortunately does not allow us to plan in-person workshops. On the other hand, actually this turned to be an opportunity for many of us: we haven't just moved in-person to online, but have found ways to meet the promise of technology: both reach more people regardless of location, but keep a local character. Thus, we will probably continue with some online workshops, even after this remote work time! In this news letter, we would like to tell you more about our effort on online co-teaching and events, as well as a tool to make your git-life more easy. ## Upcoming online workshops We are planning 2 CodeRefinery workshops, one in October and the other in November. They have different criteria for acceptance of sign-ups. Registration for the one in October will open soon and reserve a number of seats for learners from TU Delft and Aalto University (this is a collaboration with TU Delft and the Netherlands eScience Center as well as Aalto University) but we will also provide seats for participants from other institutions. The November workshop will prioritize learners in Oslo and Stockholm. Please sign up in the [notify-me form](https://indico.neic.no/event/135/surveys/36) so that you will get a notification. Also, CodeRefinery team is planning an instructor training with high-performance computing (HPC) carpentry focus (probably 12-13 November). For more information about HPC carpentry, please take a look at https://hpc-carpentry.github.io/. * CodeRefinery workshop, October 20-22 and 27-29 (six half-days) * CodeRefinery workshop, November 17-19 and 24-26 (six half-days) * Instructor training with HPC carpentry focus (probably November 12-13) ## Reflection on our effort on online workshops After [the April newsletter](https://tinyletter.com/coderefinery/letters/coderefinery-newsletter-april-2020) we ran a ["mega CodeRefinery" workshop](https://coderefinery.github.io/2020-05-25-online/), in which we could reach many more people than we could by a 3-day in-person workshop. Recordings from the workshop is available in CodeRefinery YouTube channel. Please check out the [playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpLblYHCzJAAfke64bWU0mTPQE5kVZs_p)! Our lessons learned from this workshop were summarized into [a blog post](https://coderefinery.org/blog/2020/07/31/mega-coderefinery/). Also, experiences and perspectives of different roles were presented by [a panel session at CarpentryCon2020@Home](https://2020.carpentrycon.org/schedule/#session-32) In June, we ran an online [instructor training](https://coderefinery.github.io/2020-06-24-instructor-training/) in collaboration with TU Delft. As a part of this, each CodeRefinery team member made a lightning-talk video regarding their [teaching philosophy](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpLblYHCzJAAHF89P-GCjEXWC8CF-7nhX) and [lesson episodes](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpLblYHCzJABvt25VY0wNIgbaQfTQaND7). Please check them out and get inspired! ## Open House event: making lessons citable and giving credit/visibility for contributors Thanks to all the positive and constructive feedback on our workshops, we constantly develop and improve our lesson materials. Now that the lessons are getting more visibility also outside of CodeRefinery workshops, it is the time to work on making CodeRefinery lessons really citable and giving contributors credits and visibility! ... But what is the best way?? We welcome all who have ideas, experiences, interests and enthusiasm to our [online Open House event](https://coderefinery.org/events/2020-10-02-openhouse/) to discuss this theme on the 2nd October, 2020, 9:00-12:00(CEST)/10:00-13:00(EEST). ## Workshop operation manual We have updated our [operation manual](https://coderefinery.github.io/manuals/) and ported it to a new format. We hope that this is easier to navigate and read. Contributions are most welcome! ## git-pr Have you ever been told that you should make many small pull requsets (PRs), but feel that's kind of cumbersome and requires too much effort? How often do you send PRs? Richard Darst made a script `git-pr` to make your collaborative works with git easier. Please check out [his blog-post](https://coderefinery.org/blog/2020/09/29/git-pr/). ## Carpentries Probably you have heard about or attended at a workshop of [The Carpentries](carpentries.org). Their mission is to teach foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide. CodeRefinery supports the Carpentries by promoting Carpentries workshops as well as increasing Carpentries instructors in Nordic countries. #### Centrally organized workshops Do you want to host a Carpentry workshop for researchers at your institution? If you are affiliated to an eligible institute, NeIC can offer up to 6 centrally organized workshops per year in total without coordination fee (after that it is half price)! For more information about Carpentry workshops, please see [the Carpentries workshop page](https://carpentries.org/workshops/). #### Carpentries instructor training, Nov. 12-13 Are you interested in [becoming a Carpentries instructor](https://carpentries.org/become-instructor/) and teaching Carpentries workshop at your institute or another place? If you are affiliated to an eligible institute and can commit to teach a couple of Carpentries workshops per year, NeIC will be happy to offer a pre-registered seat for Carpentries instructor training to you (up to 15 seats per year). There is an instructor training event for Central European time planned on November 12-13. For further information about eligible institutes, please refer to NeIC's [Carpentries workshop ACCESS POLICY](https://neic.no/carpentryworkshop/). If you are interested in Carpentries workshops or instructor training, please contact to [Naoe Tatara](https://neic.no/people/naoe-tatara/), the Carpentries regional coordinator for Nordic countries for more information.