Paddy McCann
I’m a Research Software Engineer working as part of the Research Computing
Service within IT Services. I work with researchers from across the University
to develop, implement and maintain the software they need to conduct and
disseminate their research. I also support researchers who write code
themselves.
In the summer of 2016, a survey about Research Data Management was sent to all
researchers at the University. I was able to get a few questions about software
included in that. About 40% of respondents said that they wrote some sort of
code as part of their research, but most (excepting Computer Science) had no
training in programming and most were not using version control software.
Following this I began to have conversations about running Software
Carpentry workshops at St Andrews. It was at this point that I met Olexandr,
and we starting working with CAPOD (as it then was – now OSDS) to run
workshops. Our first was in March 2017, where I was a Helper; soon after I
trained as an Instructor. We’ve been running regular workshops since, both via
OSDS for all researchers at the University and with other groups such as
doctoral training programs.
I teach the Unix Shell, Git and Python lessons (though hopefully not all in one
workshop). I’ve also taught the SQL lesson and the Library Carpentry Tidy Data
lesson.