Running a workshop

If you’d like to run a workshop based on this material, please do, and please let me know about it.

Notes on running a workshop

To cover all the workshop material seems to take about four and a half hours.

Any of the following will make it take longer:

  • attendees who aren’t already a little familiar with the terminal and using a text editor to edit source files
  • attendees whose machines aren’t already suitably-configured for the workshop and need software installed
  • attendees using operating systems you’re not familiar with

If you’re lucky, you’ll find that the majority of attendees have the same expertise and the same gaps in expertise. This makes it much easier to decide which parts to dwell upon and which ones you can skim over. If you’re not lucky, they will each have a completely different skillset.

You’ll do a lot of running around to look at people’s screens, so it helps to be able to get around the room easily.

The Git on the commandline section is the one where you will be in most demand - it helps great if at this stage you have one or two helpers who are familiar with Git.

Watch out for wireless network limitations - at one session the promised network turned out to block both github.com and ssh, and we had to rely on an access point created by someone’s mobile telephone.

Things that might look odd

If you’re experienced with things virtualenv and Git, some of the way things are done here might strike you as odd. For example:

Virtualenvs and code

The workshop has users put all the code they’re working with into their virtualenv directories. This is done to help associate a particular project and set of packages with each virtualenv, and saves excessive moving around between directories.

Editing and committing on GitHub

That’s certainly not what we’d normally do, but we do it here for three main reasons:

  • GitHub’s interface is a friendly, low-barrier introduction to Git operations
  • it’s easy for people to see the effects of their actions straight away
  • they get to make commits, pull requests and merges as soon as possible after being introduced to the concepts

The last of these is the most significant.

Other oddities

There may be others, which might be for a good reason or just because I don’t know better. If you think that something could be done better, please let me know.