A New Year, A New Adventure
It’s 2019, and a new SCOPE team is now working with CUAHSI. Our names are Kyle Combes, Emily Lepert, Vicky McDermott, and Charlie Weiss.
This time around, our goal is to improve the usability of CUAHSI’s JupyterHub platform in order to provide hydrologists with an accessible and powerful computing platform. It’s been a several weeks since the project started, so here’s what we’ve been up to!
We spent the first month getting familiar with the hydrology community by conducting 12 exploratory calls with graduate students, professors, and researchers. When talking to our potential users, we focused on questions regarding the work they were doing and the pain points in their workflows related to computing. From there, we created personas representing the key members of the community.
The main insight we gained from our exploration is that there is a lack of relevant resources for hydrologists to learn the fundamentals of programming. Most people simply learned through a combination of Googling specific needs and seeking out the help of more experienced colleagues. Despite the existence of many online and in-person resources for learning programming, few were used. The reasons why were fairly consistent.
Existing resources are largely geared toward those studying computer science. Given that, a common complaint was that the topics covered and examples used were not relevant to a hydrologist. People had limited time, and learning irrelevant content was a waste of it. Therefore, it was unanimously agreed upon by those we spoke to that some set of resources covering the fundamentals of programming, including relevant foundational topics and “common knowledge,” would be extremely helpful.
We then decided it would be most worthwhile to target graduate students for several reasons. First, nearly all professionals attended grad school at some point. This meant we could reach virtually everyone (given time) by only targeting one group. Second, graduate students are at a pivotal point in their careers as hydrologists. Many are learning programming for the first time, and shaping good habits and teaching common “gotchas” is particularly effective when done early. Lastly, once someone reaches their mid- to late-career years, they are more likely to be set in their ways or lack the time to learn new skills due to familial duties. Thus, focusing on graduate students makes the most sense.
After our temporary detour to explore our user group, we reoriented ourselves to the original task at hand: improving CUAHSI’s JupyterHub experience. We were shown some work that a past employee of CUAHSI had created, which gave us a great starting point to build off. Our next steps are to begin creating mockups of an improved experience and then to start implementing them. Once this foundational work is completed, we hope to utilize our user exploration insights by developing some resources for learning both the platform and Python in the context of hydrology. Until then, it’s JupyterHub design and coding time.
