Welcome to the Third Bit

Greg Wilson

Greg Wilson holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh, and has worked on high-performance scientific computing, data visualization, and computer security. He is now an adjunct professor in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and a member of the editorial boards of Doctor Dobb's Journal and Computing in Science and Engineering. His primary interests are software engineering education, particularly for computational scientists, and extensible programming systems.

• Greg's resume
• The Third Bit Blog
• Greg's calendar
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• Recommended Reading
• SciPy'06 talk
• Where's the Real Bottleneck in Scientific Computing?
• Extensible Programming for the 21st Century

Data Crunching

	Every day, all over the world, programmers recycle legacy data, translate from one vendor's proprietary format into another's, check configuration files, and search through web logs to see how many people have downloaded the latest release of their product. Data Crunching (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2005) is an overview of the tools and techniques they use to do that.
Other books: Three Sensible Adventures (Annick Press, 1999). Parallel Programming Using C++ (co-edited with Paul Lu, MIT Press, 1996). Practical Parallel Programming (MIT Press, 1995). Past, Present, Parallel: A Survey of Available Parallel Computing Systems (co-edited with Arthur Trew, Springer-Verlag, 1991).

DrProject is a web-based software project management portal that integrates a revision history viewer with issue tracking, mailing lists, a wiki, and other features. Unlike other such systems, it is specifically tailored to the needs of undergraduate instruction and team programming exercises. DrProject is currently being used in several courses at the University of Toronto, and at Queen's University; to see it in action, visit www.drproject.org.

Software Carpentry is an intensive open source course on basic software development practices for scientists and engineers. Its aim is not to turn biochemists and mechanical engineers into computer scientists; instead, it introduces them to the 20% of modern software engineering that will satisfy 80% of their needs. For more information, and the complete course notes, see swc.scipy.org.

Greg Wilson will be teaching Software Carpentry at the University of Toronto under the heading CSC2125: Topics in Software Engineering starting in January 2007. Lectures will be 10-12 a.m. on Mondays in Room 4279 of the Medical Sciences Building.

Acknowledgments

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