Posted by a.hay on 15 January 2014 - 2:33pm

Software Carpentry's first UK R bootcamp was a major success, with an over-subscribed class attending the event at the University of Cambridge.

Taking place at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences between 7 and 8 January, the bootcamp had a full house of 24 attendants, chosen from a waiting list owing to high demand. All were expected to be familiar with basic programming functions beforehand.

The aim of the event was to showcase R as a means of designing programs, version control, testing, and task automation, as well as making it available on GitHub. Participants were asked to write a program that generated plots from a local weather dataset. Since this data was easy to understand, it allowed the students to focus on programming rather than interpreting the information.

Organised by 2014 fellows, Stephen Eglen and Laurent Gatto, the event was overall very well recieved, and the two now plan further Software Carpentry bootcamps in Cambridge.