Hi everyone. My name is Belinda Weaver and I am currently working as the team leader for a group of 9 eResearch Analysts based across 6 Queensland universities. I am based in Brisbane and work at The University of Queensland. Though I officially work for the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF, which can best be described as a atate-based agency providing eResearch infrastructure to universities), I am actually employed by UQ’s Research Computing Centre in a secondment arrangement. This means I sit in a room with a lot of people who run HPC services and who also provision cloud-based services such as data storage and virtual machines for researchers to use. QCIF and the RCC jointly run the Queensland node of the Australian research cloud, and my job entails rolling out those cloud services to researchers, which is a great job to have as we have enabled some pretty amazing research so far. It is great to feel you can help researchers work more efficiently which is what drew me towards Software Carpentry in the first place. I organised an inaugural UQ bootcamp in 2014 which went really well.
I used to be a librarian. I have also been an Internet trainer, a book editor, a newspaper columnist, a project manager, a repository manager, a library branch manager and I ran the library computer system for the City of London Libraries when I lived in the UK. I have had one book published about the Internet and have written book chapters for published works on investigative journalism and writing, and I taught computer assisted journalsim and multimedia journalism at UQ. I used to run a web site and mailing list for Australian journalists. I have run workshops and trained staff in research data management. Although I have done all of these things, I have never written software code, much less taught it, so this course will be a VERY steep learning curve for me.
What I found hardest about using Git the first time was…
Regarding GitHub - I am not sure there is enough space in the world to say how hard I found trying to use it! I cried! I was using the Web interface so the instructions did not seem to relate to what I was doing. My biggest issue was I could not understand the framework, so I had no notion if I had succeeded or not in creating my pull request. And then it was merged, yay! but now my entry des not appear in the list on the blog, so I am back to despair.