Toby Hodges
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tobyhodges.carpentries.org
Toby Hodges
@tobyhodges.carpentries.org
310 followers 300 following 170 posts
he/him
Director of Curriculum at The Carpentries. Views my own. Sorry I haven't replied to your email.
"I only know that hearts made of stone will rarely sail far and may never reach home" - Chuck Ragan
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tobyhodges.carpentries.org
Why the rush? Clearly you have until 10 November to get this finished??
Erick Martins Ratamero European Molecular Biology Laboratory Data Science Centre November 10, 2025
August 29, 2025 at 12:44 PM
tobyhodges.carpentries.org
"It looked like America."
kieranhealy.org/blog/archive...
The ceremony room was the kind of place, if you are an academic like me, you might expect to be named “Salon C” or “Wabash Room” or “Sequoia East” and be the site of a sparsely-attended conference talk. The two main differences were the words stenciled on the slightly dropped ceiling, and the fact that the room was full up and alive with nervous energy. At the front of the room there was a large-screen TV. The person leading the ceremony—who, coincidentally, was the USCIS Officer who had interviewed me a couple of months ago—introduced himself and welcomed everyone. All the staff were dignified and low-key delighted. The ceremony opened with a two-minute video that consisted of Ken Burns effect pans over still images and with W.G. Snuffy Walden music underneath. The Statue of Liberty. Ellis Island. Immigrants arriving in the nineteenth century at various locations. And then photographs of the modern equivalents of those people. I began to worry that I might have something in my eye. The room filled up. It looked just as you might imagine. Some people looked like me, which is to say a middle-aged Irish guy in a standard-issue blazer and tie. There was a guy from Ghana in an immaculate suit. A couple from Algeria held their baby son. A family from the Republic of the Congo had their three young sons sit in the guest area. The boys all wore identical red-white-and-blue check. A German man looked dapper in a lavender shirt. An Indian woman had a green and gold sari. A Chinese family all in a row. A Romanian delightedly offering to take pictures of anyone in need of a photo. A Mexican man in cream-colored linen. A Peruvian woman’s bold floral dress. A family whose two children were wearing tiny plastic Stars and Stripes cowboy hats. It looked like America.
August 20, 2025 at 9:20 AM
tobyhodges.carpentries.org
if, with Python syntax highlighting
August 6, 2025 at 5:13 PM
tobyhodges.carpentries.org
I am at #CollabW25 in beautiful Stirling 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 this week. This is my first Collaborations Workshop and I am delighted to be able to join an event that so many have told me great things about in the past 🎉
An old stone bridge across a river. The bridge has four arches and pointed pillars either side of the entrances on each end. The sky is clear and fresh grass is growing on the riverbanks.
May 13, 2025 at 7:51 AM
tobyhodges.carpentries.org
Chinese firms ‘distilling’ US AI models to create rival products, warns OpenAI www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
An electron micrograph of a tardigrade modified to show the creature appearing to play a violin, with a superimposed scale indicator labelled 100 micrometers
January 29, 2025 at 1:38 PM
tobyhodges.carpentries.org
Check out the curriculum: carpentries.github.io/lesson-devel...
Learn more about the training: carpentries.org/lesson-devel...
Hexagonal sticker design for The Carpentries Collaborative Lesson Development Training, featuring a cartoon of an open book with pages containing scribbled lines, the logo of The Carpentries Incubator, and a stacked bar plot.
December 10, 2024 at 3:25 PM
tobyhodges.carpentries.org
After 276 pull requests, just under 1000 commits, and almost three years, we made our first stable release of the @thecarpentries.bsky.social Collaborative Lesson Development Training curriculum today 🎉
zenodo.org/records/1436...
A plot of lines added and deleted each week in the carpentries/lesson-development-training project on GitHub, showing prominent spikes in development activity in January and June 2022 (both 2000-3000 lines added); July, August, and October 2023 (4000 lines added and 4000 removed in July), and November 2024 (4300 lines added, 1800 lines removed).
December 10, 2024 at 3:25 PM
tobyhodges.carpentries.org
#CCHD24 kicked off today at EMBL, with an amazing coincidence: the dates perfectly coincide with the 10 year anniversary of the first Software Carpentry workshop run at EMBL! We celebrated the anniversary, with thanks to @luispedrocoelho.bsky.social and others who hosted/taught in Nov 2014!
Lisanna Paladin in the EMBL Large Operon auditorium, presenting a slide to celebrate "10 years of Carpentries & Bio-IT". Slide text reads "This community event happens to be the perfect occasion to celebrate our long standing partnership! 12 -14 November 2014: first Software Carpentry course at EMBL. To provide essential programming and data skills to 22 participants. Instructors: Holger Dinkel, Luis Pedro Coelho, Florian Huber, Thomas Wolf, and Markus H-Y Fritz. Organizers: Luis Pedro Coelho, Aidan Budd, and Gwen Sanderson"
November 12, 2024 at 2:12 PM
tobyhodges.carpentries.org
Reminds me of this XKCD that I was once so delighted to read.
You just WON The Game. It's okay! You're free!
October 10, 2024 at 8:13 AM
tobyhodges.carpentries.org
A perfect album which came out when I was 21.

If you get tired of your boyfriend's things /
There's always other boys, there's always other boyfriends
The cover art of The Hold Steady's 2006 album, Boys and Girls in America.
September 16, 2024 at 9:26 AM
tobyhodges.carpentries.org
Next week I will finally see Martha live, after eight years or so of waiting 🥹🇬🇧🔥
A tour poster for Martha's 2024 UK & EIRE Tour, featuring a cartoon of two people smoking cigarettes, standing next to a flaming wheelie bin draped in a union flag of the United Kingdom.
August 29, 2024 at 8:11 AM
tobyhodges.carpentries.org
The most unrealistic thing in Raymond Briggs' The Snowman is not that the snowman can walk or fly, it's that he melts away with such grace.
An illustration of a boy and a snowman flying, from Raymond Briggs' The Snowman. An illustration of a boy standing over the melted remains of his snowman built the previous day, with hat, scarf and coal in a neat pile on top of the melted snow, from Raymond Briggs' The Snowman. A photograph of a real melted snowman, covered in dirt and strands of brown grass, leaning awkwardly to one side, with the remains of the head fallen onto the floor.
January 18, 2024 at 8:58 AM