Do you write code for research or class? Do you sometimes get stuck? Are you just starting to learn how to code? Or, do you seek a social environment shared with fellow programmers? Writing code, or “programming,” can be a fun but also challenging and lonely enterprise. Hosted by members of the U-M community, our CoderSpaces are there for you to meet other coders, so you can connect and learn from your coder peers. Participation is open to anyone interested in writing code for computational social science, data science, statistics, social science method, engineering, etc., be they students, staff, or faculty. In our CoderSpaces, we seek to build a casual, productive and inclusive environment where everyone is welcome regardless of their skill or level of expertise, to share experiences and knowledge, assist each other in data-intensive projects, and enjoy peer-programming opportunities. We hope that participants will actively help each other as able. To participate, bring a laptop and some coding work, or just come and hang out, socialize, and assist others. Our hosts look forward to hacking with you!

Dr. Burks is a Research Data Scientist in Advanced Research Computing Technology Services (ARC-TS) and the School of Information. He specializes in evolutionary computation (genetic programming), and has professional experience in software development and writing cloud analytics. Dr. Burks is available to assist in general programming using C++, Java, and Python, bash commands/scripting, automation of tasks such as data parsing, transformation/conversion, workflow automation, etc., HPC job creation/submission, version control in git, and other related topics.

Dr. Ware is an Assistant Professor of Research in the Population, Neurodevelopment, and Genetics group at ISR, a self-taught HPC user, and an occasional instructor in the School of Information. Her training has been in genetic epidemiology, public health, and statistics using SAS (local), R (server), Linux (on GreatLakes, MBNI, and other personal servers), and batch scripting (SGE, PBS, Slurm). Dr. Ware has taught SAS (data management and statistical modeling), introductory statistics using R, and math methods for data scientists. She is experienced in teaching high performance computing to individuals with limited programming background.