The Carpentries @ UC San Diego

"The Carpentries teach foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide."

Upcoming 2026 Carpentries Workshops

Upcoming - Grab your spot! UCSD/SDSU Software Carpentries Fall Workshop

Dates: November 3–6, 2026
Time: 8:30 AM – 12:30 PM (PST)
Format: Virtual via Zoom
Cost: Free for all UC and CSU community members

The UCSD Library, Research IT, and SDSU Research Cyberinfrastructure team up to bring this FREE, four half-day Software Carpentries workshop to our research communities.

Curriculum Overview

- Day 1: The Unix Shell — Automate repetitive tasks, process batch files, and navigate command-line environments.
- Day 2: Git & Version Control — Track revision history, collaborate seamlessly, and ensure project reproducibility.
- Day 3 & 4: Python Data Analysis — Learn fundamental programming concepts, data structures, tabular data manipulation, and plot visualization using Jupyter.

What are the Carpentries?

The Carpentries is an international volunteer organization dedicated to teaching researchers foundational computational and data skills. By providing short, intensive workshops, the organization helps scientists and scholars work more efficiently, automate workflows, and increase research reliability without getting bogged down by technical overhead.

The Carpentries encompasses three specialized lesson communities:

Software Carpentry: Focuses on core programming languages and digital tools (such as Unix, Git, and Python/R) commonly used to automate tasks and build research software.
Data Carpentry: Emphasizes domain-specific data analysis skills, data cleaning, automation, and visualization to streamline tabular data management.
Library Carpentry: Focuses on data transformation, metadata manipulation, automation, and web scraping tailored for information professionals and library staff.

Together, these workshops foster universal data literacy, improve project reproducibility, and build supportive computational communities across academic institutions.

The Carpentries at UC San Diego

UC San Diego is a proud Silver-level Foundation Member of The Carpentries, supported through a partnership between the UC San Diego Library and Research IT Services. Since hosting our first workshop in 2015, our training sessions have served as a welcoming gateway for hundreds of students, staff, postdocs, and faculty taking their initial steps into computational research.

Designed to provide practical skills without the barrier of steep technical complexity, our workshops cover topics across Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry. We empower researchers to automate tasks, analyze data, and adopt modern digital tools to move their research forward. As our campus community grows, we continually expand our offerings with new lessons and customized content.

Workshop Offerings

We host both virtual and in-person workshops throughout the year, including:

Spring and Fall Bootcamps: Comprehensive 4-day sessions held every May and November.
UC-Wide and CSU Collaborations: Joint training events hosted alongside peer UC and CSU campuses.
Custom Department & Lab Workshops: Tailored 1- or 2-day sessions designed for specific research groups.
Academic Coursework Integration: Specialized workshops taught in conjunction with GPS degree programs.

Building a Community

We are building a community of engaged Carpentries @ UC San Diego instructors and helpers on our campus. Volunteer instructors and helpers are the core of our program and work together to teach data management and programming skills to the UCSD community.

As an Instructor, individuals strengthen their confidence through learning new skills, gaining teaching experience in a classroom setting, and sharing their knowledge with fellow researchers and colleagues. Instructors who go through the certification training are qualified to teach in any of the three Carpentries.

Helpers are individuals within this organization that also support the classroom workshop efforts by assisting Instructors, monitoring the room for folks who might be stuck or need help, and moderating questions that may arise during the workshop session. They are familiar with the curriculum and are able to aid in software installation and provide general troubleshooting.

Getting Involved

Each year, our membership allows for us to train and certify up to five new Carpentries instructors who help support the growing need on our campus. We welcome potential instructors who are passionate about teaching technical literacy, giving back to the community, and helping move research forward. Becoming an instructor is a great step toward enhancing your own instructional and technical proficiency and helps you to become a more effective technical communicator.

To support this, we organize -

Mailing list for Instructors and Helpers
Quarterly instructor's meetings
New Instructor interest meetings
Certified Instructor Training opportunities (Fall/Winter)

New Instructors and Helpers - now recruiting!

Research IT Services has openings for individuals interested in becoming certified instructors to teach basic scientific computing skills using the Software Carpentry (SWC) Foundation curriculum and methodology. SWC has been designed to help researchers without command line/computer programming experience to both learn and then teach others basic lab skills used in research computing (R, Python, Bash/Unix, and Git). The training to become an instructor is at no cost.

Apply Now! if you can commit to 16 total training hours.

Additional benefits to you:

Join a growing community in a worldwide organization
Develop valuable programming skills
Gain teaching experience!

Please reach out to the Carpentries @ UC San Diego at carpentries@ucsd.edu if you are interested learning more or joining our program community of instructors or helpers.

Learn More

Are you interested in learning more about The Carpentries @ UC San Diego? Contact us: carpentries@ucsd.edu.