February 2020 Update

Hello friends! 👋 It feels like such a long time since I wrote a blog post but the truth is that I’ve just been up to so many exciting things! So this blog post will be a quick run down on everything I’ve been up to recently.

At the start of January, I helped organise and run the Research Software Reactor with Tania Allard and Gerard Gorman. Our topic was “DevOps for better software and research reproducibility”. We had around 30 attendees come together at the Turing Institute for 2 days and learn about GitHub Actions for automating their workflows. The aim was to produce reproducible software to support gold-standard research.

Later on in January, I was invited to a PyData Cambridge Meetup to talk about how The Turing Way and Binder advocate for reproducible research. I also ran my Zero-to-Binder tutorial with the attendees. I received a lot of lovely feedback about how having an interactive session as part of the talk was really fun!

I kicked off February by travelling up to Manchester to attend the SSI Inaugural Fellows Meeting. It was really wonderful to meet all the other Fellows in person, hear about our goals and figure out how to work together to achieve them.

In my free time, I visited the Top Secret exhibition at the Science Museum. This exhibit explored ciphers and codebreaking through history, including the incredible work done by Alan Turing and others at Bletchley Park during the Second World War.

And lastly, I incorporated by hobby into my open source work by creating a cross stitch kit of the Binder logo to handout to attendees of The Turing Way Book Dash 📚💨

The attendees loved this little thank you gift for their hard work and will hopefully provide something relaxing to do after an intense day book dashing!

You’ll be able to find out more about what we got up to during the Book Dash later next week as we are supporting the UCU Strike by respecting the digital picket line https://medium.com/@lewisspurgin/never-cross-a-digital-picket-line-58c4249095c6 (Update 2020-08-11: Medium account deactivated by user).

So that’s everything I’ve been up to over the last month or two. It’s been jam-packed but incredibly fun and rewarding 💖 See you next month with another update!!

update