Identifying skills development demand through practise

[metazool]

Links to #18 - where there's a set of off-the-shelf courses available through the Carpentries on reproducible research software fundamentals, the things you can easily predict.

There's also demand that surfaces through working with different researchers and developers. This may be really localised, or it might be part of a larger iceberg.

Here's an example: a application developer working on data publication services in a specific science area is stuck in a very slow debugging loop because they don't have a local replica of the staging environment for their service. The backend answer is "just run it in docker-compose" but that needs some unpacking. The developer needs all these things which might already exist, but they've no way to find out:

• Ability to run docker in a self-managed environment
• Bootstrap documentation and/or workshop on container basics (in this case oriented to someone who's already comfortable with k8s basics)
• Access to a project with configuration examples close to their specific use case

All of this is likely to be useful to others. It could be a side-track or it could free up a lot of time for research work, you can't tell. If i see more examples like this i'll try to add them to the comments. I'd be glad to hear similar stories from others.