Date/Time
Date(s) - Sunday, February 9, 2020
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Location
Biotech Without Borders

Categories No Categories

This workshop will provide an introduction to programming in Python, an accessible and popular programming language used for data analysis.

No prior programming experience is necessary, but please read the pre-workshop instructions below.

Workshop Instructed By Alex Kramer:

Modern science and quantitative research often rely on the complex analysis of large amounts of data that vastly exceeds the possibility of manual computation (or even comprehension) by humans, even with the help of basic computer tools such as spreadsheets and calculators. For such intensive computation, powerful computer systems, tools, and applications have been built that require at least basic computer programming skills to leverage. This course aims to provide an introduction to programming in Python, the most accessible and one of the most popular general-purpose programming languages used for data analysis. By the end of the course, attendees will have a basic understanding of procedural programming and should be able to create simple Python programs to get, manipulate, and visualize data and to do simple analyses and distribute them in the popular Jupyter Notebook format.

Pre-workshop Instructions For Attendees:

No prior programming experience is necessary, but a laptop running Python 3 and Jupyter is required to follow along. For convenience everything you need can be installed with Anaconda. If you want to install things manually (not recommended unless you know what you are doing) you can check out this link for installing Python 3, and this link for installing Jupyter. Getting everything installed and working can take a while, so this should be done before the class. To verify you are ready, you should be able to open the Terminal app on Mac or cmd.exe on Windows and type the command “python –version” and see output that looks something like “Python 3.7.4”. You should also be able to type the command “jupyter notebook” and see the Jupyter Notebook app automatically open in a browser.

About The Instructor:

Alex Kramer is a software engineer with over a decade of professional experience and a lifelong science nerd. He holds a B.Sc. in computer science from Johns Hopkins and has shipped production bugs in at least a dozen different programming languages over the years (but usually fixes them before anyone notices…usually). When not breaking software he can be found biking around hunting for tardigrades.