Published: Feb 18, 2026 by Liam Pattinson
Project info
The University of York Research Coding Club has been delivering informal software training courses to staff and students over a number of years, and during a hiatus over the 2024-25 academic year we had the opportunity to rethink how we would organise and deliver our content. At the N8CIR Annual RSE Meetup in July 2025, we became aware of the University of Sheffield’s FAIR² for Research Software (FAIR²4RS) project, an open-source educational resource for teaching intermediate software skills at universities. With their help, we’ve been adapting their resources to design our own new-and-improved Research Coding Course.
Several of the lessons within the FAIR²4RS course are built upon a customised variant of the Carpentries Workbench, using which one can develop online software training materials from R Markdown. I had some experience of this from my previous work on a lesson on Python packaging, so it was fairly easy to get started adjusting the course material to our preferences. A tricky part of the process was to edit the University of Sheffield’s variant of Varnish – the component of the Carpentries Workbench that sets the website styling and templates – to include our own branding. I wasn’t able to build it locally, so this had to be achieved by trial-and-error and pushing to GitHub!
With our own version of Varnish working, we set to work making a few edits to the course material. It was of a high quality, so very little needed changing. Due to the limited time we would have to teach it, we chose to omit some material and substitute some topics we felt were missing; for example, we replaced a section on testing data structures such as lists and dicts with a section on testing floating point data with appropriate tolerances. We also edited the section on regression testing to make use of our own snapshot library, snaptol, and overhauled the CI lesson to explore some of the benefits of CI, such as the ability to test on different platforms than your own.
We unfortunately didn’t have time to deliver all of the course material during our session, but the experience will be informative when we’re designing future courses, which should now be much easier now we have our own variant on the Carpentries Workbench up and running.