Prerequisites

• If you choose to participate using the command line, then you should be able to navigate the file tree in a terminal session and edit text files in the terminal. This Linux shell crash course (video) contains the essentials.
• We assume you already use some programming or scripting language but we do not require knowing a particular programming language. We try to keep this course independent of a specific programming language and relevant for all languages (but it is a process and not all material is completely generic yet).
• Read how to attend a livestream course.
• Printing this Git cheatsheet would be helpful - it was made by us and we'll refer to it.

Preparation (software installation)

It takes a bit of time to install and configure the required software but with 500 or more participants it is not doable to debug these during the workshop and we ask you to install and configure these before you arrive at the workshop following the instructions and checklist on this page.

Please make sure that Git is configured, and verify the configuration (text instructions, video).

We offer install help sessions (see schedule). Please use one of these. It will improve the workshop experience for you and others.

We now also provide a verification script to help you check software and configuration with one command.

Privacy and tools/online services

In CodeRefinery, we try to teach you tools that we see being used in the research world and tools we consider important. This sometimes leads to situations where a tool that is commonly used is not the tool that is most open or anonymous.

We encourage everyone to install the software we suggest, to be able to follow the course without additional issues. However, if you do not want to use the software or services we suggest for any reason (we understand that there are good reasons for doing so) you should be aware that the hands-on aspects of the course are unlikely to apply as is.

In any case, we suggest following the instructors and fellow learners to learn about the suggested software and its possible differences with your choice of tools. In many cases there may even be a more open/ anonymous tool for the job, we hope you understand that we can not offer support for every possible tool (everyone has their preferences). Our decision for using the tools we suggest in this workshop is based on what we think will be most useful for most of our learners. Here we try to balance between usefulness and privacy and hope we are doing a good job. If you are unsure about anything or do not agree with our choice, feel free to contact us or contribute directly to our lesson material to make it more inclusive while also being useful for the majority of our learners.