About us

Software Carpentry develops and teaches workshops on the fundamental programming skills needed to conduct research. Our mission is to provide researchers high-quality, domain-specific training covering all aspects of research software engineering.

Having started in 1998, Software Carpentry is now a lesson program within The Carpentries. Its focus is on the computing skills researchers need to get more done in less time and with less pain, and its volunteer Instructors have run thousands of events for almost 100,000 people since 2012. Our target audience is researchers who have some prior programming experience but who are largely self-taught and are ready to move from writing short programs for personal use to collaborating with others on larger, reusable pieces of software.

We teach hands-on workshops in the Unix shell, version control, and programming in languages such as Python and R to increase computational competence and improve research efficiency. Our evidence-based pedagogy, combined with rapid iteration on content, ensures that our lessons are directly connected to real scientific questions and directly relevant to participants’ research. We create a friendly environment for learning to empower researchers, and all of our lesson materials are freely reusable under an open license.

Workshops like ours cannot teach people everything they need to know about research software engineering, but they drastically reduce the barrier to entry and impart the skills and confidence needed for continued learning and engagement. To learn more about our history and the lessons we’ve learned along the way, please read “Software Carpentry: Lessons Learned”.