Celebratory blogpost

content/blog/2024-09-19-celebration.md

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+title = "CodeRefinery - Celebrating eight years"
+slug = "2024/09/19/celebrating-8-years"
+description = "Continuing eight years of collaboratively teaching good enough research software engineering practices"
+
+[extra]
+authors = "Samantha Wittke"
++++
+
+<img width="600px" src="/blog/2024-09-19-celebration/cr-small.jpg" alt="CodeRefinery logo as a hand-carved wooden stand">
+
+<!-- toc -->
+
+## CodeRefinery started 8 years ago
+
+In October 2024 the CodeRefinery project was celebrating the conclusion of its
+8th year of existence.  During that time about 9 online and 28 in-person
+workshops were held by ~30 instructors, organizers and facilitators teaching
+good enough research software engineering practices to ~3000 participants from
+~20 countries, of many scientific fields, career stages and preferred
+programming languages.  We would like to celebrate this achievement with you,
+by looking back at the history and achievements unlocked over the years and
+also ask you to share your best memories.  Spoiler: Even though this is a
+"looking back" post, CodeRefinery will not cease to exist anytime soon if we
+can help it.  We'd just like to celebrate the project and highlight the
+contributions of key members.
+
+The project grew out of an initially local course (given at KTH Stockholm in
+2014 and 2015) and in 2016 became a Nordic project.  Rossen Apostolov (KTH
+Stockholm) submitted a proposal to the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration
+(NeIC) in 2015 and NeIC quickly recognized it as a potentially impactful
+project worth co-funding. The project was started in 2016, under the leadership
+of Radovan Bast, project manager of CodeRefinery for the whole duration of the
+project.
+
+Thor Wikfeldt remembers: "[...] I have had the privilege of working with
+Radovan Bast since 2016 when the CodeRefinery project was launched, and I
+joined under his leadership.  Among all the highly competent individuals I have
+encountered in my career, Radovan stands out for his relentless dedication and
+selfless commitment to making a meaningful impact on the world.  He has
+inspired me to not only become a better teacher and developer of training
+materials but also to be more productive, collaborative and generous in my
+professional life.  Radovan took CodeRefinery from a mere concept to a
+pioneering educational project that is now well- known not only in the Nordic
+region (where it started) but globally. [...] "
+
+
+## What is CodeRefinery?
+
+CodeRefinery acts as a hub for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and
+Reusable) software practices. It currently focuses on the Nordic/Baltic
+countries, but aims to expand beyond this region.  CodeRefinery aims to operate
+as a community project with support from academic organizations. The project
+started in 2016 and has developed a broad curriculum of openly maintained and
+reviewed lessons, has taught hundreds of participants across all academic
+disciplines, and has managed to build a community of instructors, learners,
+team leads (who help learners during exercises), expert helpers (who support
+team leads), local organizers and partner organizations.
+
+The project idea/directive grew out of two courses given at PDC/KTH in 2014 and
+2015, which focused on research software engineering tools and techniques.  The
+courses were popular and it was clear that the demand is not limited to the
+Stockholm region and we approached NeIC to bring this project to a Nordic
+level, both to have more impact, but also to connect instructors across Nordic
+borders.  The first CodeRefinery workshop was given late 2016 and since then
+the lesson material has evolved a lot and we have delivered many more
+workshops, both in-person and online.
+
+CodeRefinery has established itself as a highly successful initiative that
+improves coding skills at an intermediate level, bridging the gap between
+Software Carpentry for beginners, and the more advanced/bespoke training
+offered by other universities and HPC/computational research initiatives.
+
+The objectives of the CodeRefinery project are:
+• Organize and deliver workshops and events
+• Develop and maintain a lesson portfolio
+• Build a community and network of instructors and volunteer helpers
+• Operate a Nordic GitLab service
+• Support the community of Nordic research software engineers
+
+
+## CodeRefinery workshops
+
+The CodeRefinery project provides open, reusable and self-learning ready lesson
+materials developed by experts from different countries, organizations and
+scientific backgrounds.  CodeRefinery focuses on maintaining collaboration in
+lesson development, teaching and workshop organization. Workshops with multiple
+roles especially highlight the value of collaborative efforts.
+
+The workshops are focused around exercises and discussions and participants are
+encouraged to form teams for these sessions.  The learning outcomes for each
+lesson are defined and shared in the beginning of each lesson.
+
+We kindly request feedback from participants after each workshop day. Feedback
+is gathered using known tools with no separation between workshop and feedback.
+If necessary and possible, given feedback is already implemented for the next
+workshop day.
+
+The CodeRefinery project maintains manuals with a collection of work processes
+and ideas (<https://coderefinery.github.io/manuals/>).  It summarizes how
+meetings, workshops and other topics work and serves as basis for e.g. the
+helper onboarding for the workshop.
+
+
+## Bring your own classroom
+
+When switching from in-person to online workshops the CodeRefinery team put a
+lot of effort in embracing the online workshop format.  A lot of thought has
+been put into our online hand-on, demo and screen sharing setups in order to
+provide the best possible learning experience to participants.
+
+Since 2020 we had multiple local classrooms join our workshop and have adapted
+the format to accommodate these special circumstances.
+
+Paula Martinez Lavanchy shares: "[...][W]e have been ‘bringing our own class’ to
+the CodeRefinery workshops by joining the streaming of the lessons from the classroom with
+our participants and helpers.
+TU Delft researchers provided very positive feedback about this initiative reflected in
+comments such as:
+“It's great and extremely useful. If it was it for me I would make it mandatory knowledge. It's
+really important that TU Delft continues promoting these workshops.”
+“Excellent workshop: the graduate school would be so much better with more of these
+practical & technical workshops”
+The CodeRefinery initiative has helped us and benefit TU Delft researchers in several ways:
+- The possibility of joining the workshops allowed us to advance with the
+implementation of our Vision for Research Data & Software management training
+and the implementation of TU Delft Research Software Policy by providing high
+quality and well-received training on FAIR software practices.•
+- The involvement of our data stewards, software engineers and trainers as helpers in
+the CodeRefinery workshops have also provided them with a great opportunity to
+continuously improve their skills and learn from this great community.
+- The CodeRefinery learning materials are openly available and of excellent quality.
+We often refer our researchers to use them as consultation materials on our websites
+and/or guides. [...]"
+
+
+## Sharing experiences and support for doing your own thing
+
+But the CodeRefinery project does not only focus on own workshops, it also
+wants to make it easier for others to provide clean and functional lesson
+materials with all the features needed for computational topics by providing a
+public lesson template (<https://github.com/coderefinery/sphinx-lesson>).  In
+addition, the ways that teaching has worked well for CodeRefinery are shared
+through train the trainer workshops, which have been presented in different
+forums and to various groups (<https://coderefinery.github.io/train-the-trainer/>).
+
+The lesson development process always involves multiple experts. All
+discussions and reviews are public and can be found on our GitHub pages
+(<https://github.com/coderefinery>).
+
+Since it is free and open to reuse, there is no full overview about who has
+reused CodeRefinery materials. But when talking to people at conferences and
+other events we often get to hear that teachers are happily reusing the
+CodeRefinery materials for their lectures.
+
+Two larger programs that have been built on top of CodeRefinery materials are
+the Netherlands eScience Center workshop on "Good practices in research
+software development"
+(<https://www.esciencecenter.nl/event/good-practices-in-research-software-development-5/>)
+and the "EuroCC best practices in HPC training" program lead by ENCCS Sweden
+(<https://enccs.github.io/instructor-training/>).
+
+Mateusz Kuzak and his team from the Netherlands eScience center explains:
+"[...] At the Center, we have been successfully using the training materials
+developed by the CodeRefinery project since 2020. At that time, CodeRefinery
+filled the gap in the intermediate research software skills for researchers.
+We already delivered training based on the Carpentries and were looking for
+more advanced content for researchers already doing some programming. What I
+appreciate about the project is that Radovan and others didn’t just reinvent
+everything. They build the Trainer the Trainer programme on top of excellent
+Carpentries Instructor Training.  They also realised that the pedagogical
+methodology used by the Carpentries, heavily dependent on live coding, would
+not work that well for intermediate audiences.  They developed a curriculum
+rich in independent work on complex exercises. At the eScience Center, we found
+that approach more effective for less novice learners.  CodeRefinery was also
+very innovative, introducing a distributed online approach with many helpers
+supporting locally or in online breakout rooms.  I believe that helps with
+scaling the course and reaching a new audience that otherwise wouldn't be able
+to access this training.  We at the eScience Center will continue reusing and
+contributing to the CodeRefinery project. [...]"
+
+
+## More than just workshops
+
+The main CodeRefinery workshop is organized twice a year and it is free and
+open for everyone. Everyone is encouraged to ask their questions and discuss
+the topics that interest them in a collaborative document. Instructors have a
+variety of different scientific and cultural backgrounds and are in different
+stages in their career.  After each workshop participants are encouraged to
+join the community which mainly lives in the CodeRefinery Zulip chat that to
+date is a home to 446 people with about 10% being really active.  The chat is
+also home to the Nordic-RSE and Nordic-HPC communities which are tightly knit
+with CodeRefinery. The chat serves as a space for planning, support and
+discussions around different topics. Participants of the CodeRefinery workshops
+are encouraged to use the chat also beyond the workshop to ask their questions
+around workshop topics and beyond. Some participants even have found their way
+into the project this way.
+
+While the workshops are the main event for CodeRefinery, it is also a community
+with an open heart for supporting research and providing courses on a
+researchers level.  Research Software Hour was born from the community, and has
+brought topics of Research Software Engineering that you cannot teach in a
+class to the research community (<https://researchsoftwarehour.github.io/>)
+hosted by the nominee and others.
+
+A Zenodo community is available to collect all CodeRefinery and CodeRefinery related outputs:
+<https://zenodo.org/communities/coderefinery/records?q=&l=list&p=1&s=10&sort=newest>
+
+CodeRefinery is also active on social media: LinkedIn (314 followers), X (860 followers) and Mastodon (296 followers).
+
+
+## Reaching out
+
+The CodeRefinery project has been mentioned alongside other successful programs such as the Carpentries in Research Software Engineering related publications:
+
+- I. A. Cosden, K. McHenry and D. S. Katz, "Research Software Engineers: Career Entry Points and Training Gaps," in Computing in Science & Engineering,
+  vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 14-21, Nov.-Dec. 2022, doi: 10.1109/MCSE.2023.3258630 or on arxiv; page 7
+
+- US Research Software Engineer Association, & IEEE Computer Society. (2023). Research Software Engineers: Creating a Career Path—and a Career.
+  Zenodo. <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10073233> ; page 19
+
+- Barker, M., Breitmoser, E., Broadbent, P., Chue Hong, N., Hettrick, S., Lampaki, I., Quinn, A., & Taylor, R. (2024). Software and skills for research computing in the UK.
+  Zenodo. <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10473186> ; page 15
+
+A collection of reports (<https://coderefinery.org/about/reports/>) and
+presentations (<https://coderefinery.org/about/presentations/>) about the project
+are collected on our website.
+
+Project members have been actively seeking opportunities to spread the word and
+share the experiences from running the CodeRefinery workshops at conferences in
+the research computing world.  Among others the project has been presented at
+Supercomputing (SC) conference in the US, International SuperComputing (ISC) in
+Germany, SIAM, RSECon and CarpentryCon in recent years.
+
+
+## The future
+
+We are currently in the third round of funding by NeiC (one person to
+coordinate the efforts, other partners support in-kind) and considering our
+next steps.
+
+One thing is clear: CodeRefinery will not end or cease to exist.
+
+We are in contact with funders and past and potential future organizations to
+make these efforts go on and likely we will continue the funded coordination +
+in-kind partners model.  For other structures we may collaborate with other
+organizations and projects.
+
+If this project and its mission sounds like something you would like to join or
+support, please contact [email protected] and we can discuss in more
+detail.

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