# Meeting - 25 March 2024

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## Meeting Info

This is the UK Carpentry Community space for the UK Carpentry instructors, helpers and workshop coordinators (or anyone involved in training tech to researchers in general and outside of the UK) to get to know each other better, update the commmunity about developments, discuss issues and ideas, and encourage collaboration.

During these meetings, we will be conforming to [The Carpentries Code of Conduct](https://docs.carpentries.org/topic_folders/policies/code-of-conduct.html).

**Meeting schedule: meetings happen on 4th Monday each month, 16:00-17:00 UK time, BST (UTC+1) or GMT (UTC+0) depending on the time of the year**

**Meeting details are shared via [local-uk mailing list](https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/local-uk) and [The Carpentries community calendar](https://carpentries.org/community/#community-events).**

- [Community's HackMD workspace](https://hackmd.io/team/local-uk?nav=overview)
- [Previous & upcoming meetings](https://hackmd.io/V3ReKkEESzqyCNxWJdulOw#Meeting-Notes)
- [Meeting notes template](https://hackmd.io/hgl1tYhOTTqDsIDwjArE5w)
- [Chairing rota](https://hackmd.io/@local-uk/rkPK1Si7F)
- [Guest speaker sign-up](https://hackmd.io/@local-uk/rkkzBTLOd)

**Zoom URL:** https://zoom.us/j/95360073649

## Meeting Minutes

- **Chair:** Aleks Nenadic
- _Make sure to email <[e-mail]> after the meeting with trainee instructors who joined for the community discussion as part of the checkout_
- **Timekeeper:**
- **Notetaker:** Andrew Walker

### Agenda
0. Assign notetaker & timekeeper
1. Sign in & ice-breaker
1. Review of actions
2. Announcements
3. Guest speaker + Q&A
- Dimitrios Theodorakis (Met Office) will talk to us about his work to develop the Carpentries Workbench format
5. Instructor Training checkout questions
6. Question from Fenne Riemslagh (The Netherlands Carpentry community)
7. Wrap-up/AOB

### Sign-in

Name/pronoun if you like/ institution / optionally put "(checkout)" if you are here for the Instructor Training checkout:

1. Fenne Riemslagh / she,her,hers/ Netherlands eScience Center / interested in community building
2. Aleks Nenadic, she/her, Software Sustainability Insititute, Uni of Manchester UK
3. Andrew Walker, he/him, University of Oxford
4. Dimitrios Theodorakis, he/him, Met Office UK
5. Mario Antonioletti, he/him, EPCC/SSI University of Edinburgh
6. Oscar Seip, he/him, Software Sustainability Institute, University of Manchester
7. Juan Herrera (he/him), EPCC (The University of Edinburgh).
8. Neil Shephard, he/him, University of Sheffield
9. Doug Lowe, he/him, Research-IT, University of Manchester
10. Rob Davey, he/him, The Carpentries
11. Olexandr Konovalov, he/him, University of St Andrews
12.
...

### Notes

#### Introductions
* Everybody introduced themselves
* Thanks to Rob (Davey) for fixing a CodiMD certificate issue last week (when Alex, Doug and Andrew were teaching https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/python-intermediate-development-earth-sciences/)

#### Announcements from Toby Hodges, The Carpentries

1. Join Maintainer Onboarding: The Carpentries is calling for volunteers to become lesson Maintainers. 2024 Maintainer Onboarding will run in April, and you do not need to be an expert with Git and/or GitHub to get involved. Please apply by 5 April. Learn more in the recent blog post: https://carpentries.org/blog/2024/03/maintainer-onboarding-2024/
2. Submit Proposals for CarpentryConnect Heidelberg 2024 (12 - 14 November 2024): Submit your session proposals for the community event taking place in Germany in November! Learn more in the recent blog post https://carpentries.org/blog/2024/02/cchd24-call-for-proposals/ and send your proposals via the submission form https://survey.bio-it.embl.de/496554?lang=en

#### Other announcements

1. Remember the SSI collaboration's workshop https://www.software.ac.uk/workshop/collaborations-workshop-2024-cw24 - almost 100 people registered so far. Expect 100-120. Hybrid event. 30 April - 2 May.

#### Dimitrios Theodorakis - info on the capentries workbench

**Background:** outline of the 3 R packages that make up the workbench
1. varnish - CSS, HTML etc for overall formatting
2. pegboard - used to parse the markdown content from the lesson
3. sandpaper - uses pandoc to deal with each episode

**Motivation:** Started looking at some Fortran material (introduction to Modern Fortran) and moving it over to the workbench. Three things to consider. Tab groups. Templating. [Mermaid diagrams](https://mermaid.js.org/) (e.g. for UML). Playing around with these packages was very easy and fun.

**Tab groups:** emulated what could be done in Spynx. So multiple tabs of answers can be grouped together (e.g. choosing options from 'archer2' or 'gfortran'). One use case is OS to always show the same thing throughout. Some things cannot go inside (okay with normal text, code blocks and lists, not some other things). See PR in sandpaper for details. In this lesson will be used for different Fortran compilers and maybe for different IDEs. Written in Lua. Code could use checking (see [sandpaper PR 571](https://github.com/carpentries/sandpaper/pull/571).

**Templating:** in varnish. Modified CSSS (needed to do this for tabs). Also added 'dark.scss' which sets colours for dark mode. Also implements new javascript to change theme. Also selects from theme in browser. Looking at solarised mode too (increases accessability).

**Mermaid diagram:** Found in a varnish issue. Useful for github branch diagrams. Class diagrams. UML etc. Goes in as a "normal" code block mearked mermaid. Build and get a diagram with links, accessable text, and diagram source code. Looks nice. See [varnish PR 125](https://github.com/carpentries/varnish/pull/125).

**Q&A:**

1. Aleks: mermaid diagrams used in https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/python-intermediate-development/14-collaboration-using-git/index.html#git-refresher - very nice approach. Small peice of javascript. Version controlable.
2. Neil: really good to see Mermaid integration. Thanks for the work! Nice examples are in the PR. Struggles for really large diagrams. The online tool (https://mermaid.js.org/) is very useful. e.g. [example](https://mermaid.live/edit#pako:eNqtkkFv3CAQhf-KNdLKqWS2GBtsuEVJ1BzaU2-VLyzGuyix2WBcJbH83wubbrSRkm2lFh8wwzdvHtKbQdlWg4DVajaD8SKZU7_TvU5Fkm7kqNMsSbfGf3Fyv0vjrbNeen1l-974r3Kj70PVu0kvzZAcV_hfVquXwrH59VodWhPTiqQBjMqKdDnOG3gfyBHN65y17COAIFYx3nUkuYh-P51wGycHtQvMMCI36s85etbOotb8NKOxwxmSoPFhkk4jZ60_nbzT6s5O_m8037gsUK0oaZU-K_bh2FOpEtVaFTWX_8MXRaTIaSfxv_tiiBe6qiv1nlQvzfBa7bXb6jNWfwtWaKPKgsdsJF5uY-nboTPiyZ9edntzed0AZBCmheltyPgcyQYO-W4gQq10d1FgCdy0b0Owb1rjrQMRI52BnLz9_jSo4_mFuTZy62QPopP3Y6ju5fDD2jdnEDM8gkBljdecVuHDvGSkrmkGTyAYXjNMaHhbznnY-JLB80GCrDEpcVHTvKAF47xafgEE6hXn). Currently I've been using the _Actions > Copy Markdown_ approach to embed images in the Workbench but having it integrated into Sandpaper directly is much neater, everything is version controlled in one place. Like yourself I develop my diagrams on [Mermaid Live](https://mermaind.live) and once they are working copy and paste them into the document I'm working on. In the context of the Workbench this avoids having to re-render the site each time the Mermaid diagram is changed.
3. Is merging on the workplan (including the javascript)? Robert: yes, probably include a minified version so that it works without internet connection.
4. Aleks: group tabs - does this replace acordian for problems? And setup instructions? Yes, for things like compilers and setup instructions. Also wants to keep the compilers content throughout the lesson. Key points is that grouped tabs all change together. Good for lessons where windows and linux differ.
5. Olexandr: If we will have time for technical discussions can we spend a couple of minutes at these two https://github.com/ukrainian-carpentries/git-novice/issues/1 (fonts) and https://github.com/ukrainian-carpentries/git-novice/issues/4 (rendering issue) please?
6. Doug: general techical question. What is the best way to run the workbench locally? Aleks can help offline.

Massive thanks to Dimitrios!

#### Community questions from Fenne

Starting small community for the capentries in NL. Who generally joins these meetings in UK? **How broad (instructors / coordinators / RSEs)?** Aleks: Mostly certified instructors plus some RSEs who are involved in training but not certified (yet?). Mormally get 10 - 17 people on the call. Meet once per month. Also have a mailing list. Mario: Aleks tends to chair, but it's good to share the chairing load. You don't want it to be a one-person shop. Can also do round-robin Good to have infrastructure that's not tied to a particular institute. **Where?** In NL it is possible to have in-person meetings. We don't do that in UK. Aleks: e.g. we use hackmd for notes - an example of accessable infrastructre. Sync with github. **Who** tend to try to have a speaker. Aleks is thinking about book club but difficult to keep easy for people to just turn up and participate. **What are recent topics** this time it was the workbench (see above). Last month two sprints on lesson development. A report on deep learning lesson and sprints for this and a second report on multi-timezone lib carp lesson spint. See https://hackmd.io/V3ReKkEESzqyCNxWJdulOw#Meeting-Notes. **How to find helpers / instructors?** UK based network to connect people. We have a similar problem. People reach out through UK mailing list. RSE society (national chapters can help). Collaboration between "regional" groups (Kings, UCL, Imperial for example). Easer to do on cost-free basis as day rates for RSE time is high. Doctoral training centers / sort course training grants. Helps pay for trainers time (which makes things easer). These are often multi-site grants. Active local groups help but are hard to maintain.