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title: CodeRefinery Sep 24 workshop b

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## CodeRefinery Sep 24 workshop blog draft

[TOC]

In September 2024 we successfully held our XX large online CodeRefinery workshop: [Event page](https://coderefinery.github.io/2024-09-10-workshop/).

:::info
Key facts about the September '24 workshop
- Dates:  Sep 10-12 & 17-19, 2024
- Time: Half-day 9-13.30 CEST each day
- Organizers and helpers: XX
- Instructors: XX 
- Registrations: XX from XX countries all around the world
- Max viewers per day: 131, 88, 77, 77, 54, 47
- Twitch replay views (at some point in time): 481, 270, 222, 222, 174, 135
- Number of YouTube recording views (between workshop and now): 747 across all 13 videos
:::


## Workshop overview

As with previous workshops, we have invited participants to join as individual learners or in online or on-site teams. 

Week 1 covered everything from introduction to version control with git to working collaboratively on GitHub in a highly interactive, exercise-based format. This material has been completely updated in XX to correspond more to how researchers may encounter and work with git in their daily lives.  Read more about the update and the reasons for it in our blogpost: XX. 

Week 2 continued to be demo based (like last time) rather than exercise-based, since the material introduces multiple new tools and concepts at the same time for which there is not enough time during the workshop to properly prepare for exercises. This was the second time, we held the workshop this way and like last time, we got conflicting feedback about it. We believe however, that showing how tools like Snakemake are used in real world situations and talking about the tricky aspects is more valuable to learners than trying out some artifically simple example. We do encourage learners to try it out by themselves after the workshop and come to our "bring your own code" sessions a month after the workshop if they encounter any issues. 


## Onboarding

The teaching was conducted using the now thoroughly tested and proven "co-teaching" model. This way, instructors could be onboarded by their co-instructors and in occasions where both instructors were new to the lesson, a previous instructor of that lesson provided support in addition to each lessons instructor notes. 

We also provided two onboarding sessions for team leaders and other helpers where we mainly shared some information about how the workshop works and how others have handled the team situation. Materials can be found in our manuals : XX. 

For participants we provided two installation help sessions. XX


## Streaming setup

The workshop was streamed via twitch and thanks to new developments by our broadcaste it was now even possible for instructors to see and influence what was shown on stream. It included audio warnings for going live/off-live, audible notifications for event such as questions, and an easier live preview.  For the first time, we trained another broadcaster to take over for a day.


## Bring your own code sessions

We understand that it can be a long way from listening to our lessons and applying those lessons and tools to own projects. To reduce this gap we have started (already one year ago) to offer bring-your-own-code (BYOC) sessions few weeks after the workshop. The idea is to bring own scripts/notebooks/codes and we can together constructively look at them and give feedback and answer all questions about the tools and techniques that we taught during the workshop.

The first was on October 22, the second will be December 18. During the first session learners showed up, shared their projects via screen-share and asked questions and it was a lot of fun and we got good feedback.

We are looking forward to the second session (December 18) and hope to see you there. You can write to support@coderefinery.org if you would like to get a calendar invite for the December 18 session.


## Participant feedback summary

We asked participants after every workshop day about "one good thing about today" and "one thing to improve for next time". 

Participant thoughts on broad topics to improve: 
- More time for exercises (week 1); exercises over demo (week 2)
- More in depth introduction of topic X
- Big picture overview
- More info on the different paths

Some (handpicked) highlights of the workshop from participants:
- Great combination of interaction with the video + notes document (HedgeDoc) + materials website + own work. 
- Nice course materials
- Cute cat(s)
- Practical tasks, easy to understand, usefull for use in the near future
- Sharing of best practices and pitfalls
- (Newly provided) RStudio path for practical exercises
- I understood a lot more git commands than just commit, push and pull, was finally able to connect github with VScode and git bash (command line)
- Behind the scenes team were fast to answer questions and solving issues 
- Thank you for providing help for both GitHub interface as well as git CLI
- I confidently and corectly used things learned yesterday.
- Never thought copyright and legal issues could be interesting 
- I liked that many topics were introduced in a basic manner, thus giving us the tools to expand upon them further on our own time, based on our needs.
- Shared experiences, thank you very much!
- A lot of important information that is difficult to get into yourself, this really helped getting started!


## Organizer lessons-learned

Due to last minute updates, our intro became very long and textual. We need to rework some old texts into more to the point information. 

We introduced multiple tracks for version control exercises (command line, VS Code, Github) and partly also for tools in week 2. It needs to be made more clear how these work and when to choose what. During teaching we need to make more clear which track is being followed and possibly focus only on one track. 

We use the collaborative document for distributing information, eg links to materials, break timing etc to participants as well as for asking questions both way. There needs to be an easy way to highlight questions that are intended for the participants to answer (eg. polls).

As mentioned above, our streaming setup is pretty advanced, however a lot of effort has been put into making it easier for anyone to take the role of director, broadcaster and video processor. Now we need to get people more confident in taking on that role to not rely on only one person. 

We lightly encourage participants to join our chat after the workshop. This often results in some people signing up but never being active. We would like to make it less scary to make use of the chat where many people hang out that would be delighted to support others with their RSE-type questions.


XX

## Thank you

We would like to take this opportuinity to thank all organizers for smooth organization, instructors for a wonderful workshop experience and sharing their tips and tricks. Finally, we would like to thank all of the participants for active participation and constructive feedback!

 







