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2023-09-28.log
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<nckx>ACTION just noticed that GWL is today's gnu.org honoured ‘random package’. <rekado>I’ll take this as my annual reminder to continue hacking on it before the HPC report comes along <civodul>it’s an honor to be the random package of the day <rekado>yesterday was the workshop and nothing went according to plan <rekado>I had prepared a VM with the compiled Guix source tree, git, firefox, etc. <rekado>but then people showed up with Macs <rekado>I was told participants would have watched the 1 hour intro from last week but only one did. <rekado>and it was hard to keep on track because of audience questions <rekado>was more like a really long Q&A with bits of presentations in between <rekado>I’d be happy to hear how you organize hands-on workshops and how you keep them from falling apart <rekado>for me the biggest difficulty is to keep it interesting for all participants in spite of their wildly differing backgrounds <rekado>the organizers thanked me and were happy with the result, but I felt it was rather messy and not at all what I had in mind. <rekado>some of the problems could probably be avoided by clearly communicating requirements, both for preparatory materials and for resources during the workshop <rekado>but a common issue is that some people ask questions that totally derail the flow <civodul>for hands-on session, we usually have VMs wit Guix preinstalled that people can use <civodul>we ask for SSH keys beforehand and all, and invite them to optionally install it on their laptop, but it’s really optional <civodul>my experience is that there are often lots of questions, which is nice in a way <civodul>but it means you have to be prepared to be derailed :-) <civodul>in particular, i now spend more time on things like environment variables <civodul>since that’s often a major source of questions <rekado>we had one participant who actually had practical experience with Nix <rekado>and some others to whom the whole concept of building software was rather foreign <rekado>the former works in a team that explores building the OS for their network switches with Nix <rekado>sounds really exciting to me, to go beyond just the use of applications on legacy distros <rekado>it always comes as a surprise to me how little admins know about environment variables <rekado>there’s often a lot of confusion about how ‘commands’ become available to the shell <rekado>but people lack an understanding of what components they are actually dealing with <rekado>unaware of the shell, assuming that ‘Linux’ does something, etc <rekado>for those participants it’s all just way too much new stuff to learn <rekado>so by the time we get to the fun stuff they’ve already checked out <rekado>(of course there’s also a good chance to run into long-winded but terribly vague ‘couldn’t we just…’ type of questions which essentially serve as a break for everyone else.) <rekado>I got some questions about Spack and I think it’s much easier to give a fair, good answer about the pros and cons of Spack than it is to answer questions about Conda. <jonsger>rekado: how many participants did that course have? <civodul>was it HPC-oriented? mostly sysadmins? <rekado>jonsger: initially there were … 2 <rekado>then I went to fetch a coffee with one of them, and upon my return there were about 15 or so <rekado>civodul: it was a general ‘IT’ audience, not purely HPC <rekado>the IT4Science days had many talks from a management perspective (which is a foreign world to me for the most part) <rekado>but in between there were also a few talks about scientific computing and working in the HPC mines <rekado>I think the event scope was just a little too broad, so there’s no way of accommodating a mixed audience like this <rekado>in early October I’ll have another presentation, this time in front of an audience of scientists who want to learn about scientific computing. <rekado>that’s usually an easier audience for me to target <rekado>I feel like I’m making up for lost time :)