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A team of experts from the Software Sustainability Institute is currently working on a new Intermediate Software Development training course, which will be piloted then launched later this year. 

The online pilot for this course will be run around May - June 2021, over three or four half-days. We’re looking for a base of learners from a broad set of backgrounds in academia. If you’d like to be considered, please fill in the form to express your interest by the end of April.

A typical learner for this course may be someone who finished an undergraduate degree and, moving into academic research and needing to write some code, gained basic software development skills either by self-learning or attending for example a novice Software Carpentry course (shell, Python, Git). However, their software development-related projects are now facing other challenges, such as:

• Software is becoming more complex and more collaborative development effort is needed to keep the software running.
• Software is going further than just the small group developing and/or using the code - there are more users and the increasing need to add new features and support collaborations with others.
• Increased ‘technical debt’ and demands to add new functionality while ensuring previous development efforts remain functional and maintainable.

Software Carpentry usually teaches basic lab skills for research computing so that researchers can get more done in less time. The new SSI training course provides intermediate software development skills as a next step to courses like Software Carpentry. It teaches skills like feature branch workflow in Git, unit testing and using continuous integration, object oriented and functional programming, practical software design, and releasing your code to the world.