Hi everybody,
We recently hosted a three-day Julia workshop at the University of Oulu with @carstenbauer from the University of Cologne as the guest speaker. The workshop was based on another workshop that Carsten had given in Cologne in October 2019. The workshop gave students an opportunity to earn some course credits by making a contribution to the Julia ecosystem (in the form of an issue or pull request on GitHub, etc.), and an example of a student contribution can be seen here.
So far Julia has had only a few users in Oulu, but the workshop gathered together around 20 students and researchers of varying programming backgrounds, most of whom seemed enthusiastic about what Julia can offer. The main study fields of the attendees ranged from physics to computer sciences and various engineering disciplines, and we are hopeful that the workshop encouraged the attendees to try out Julia in their own work. As both an organizer and an attendee, I thought the workshop was great, and it definitely convinced me to use Julia over Python as well as to put in the hours to contribute to the project in the future.
We thought that we would share the workshop material that Carsten put together for us. The practical examples piqued the attendees’ interest, so hopefully they will prove useful to others as well, or perhaps on their own convince somebody to switch to Julia: https://github.com/crstnbr/JuliaOulu20.
The workshop is also a chance for the Julia community to give itself a pat on the back. My own supervisor, who put together the workshop, first met Carsten in JuliaCon 2018, and later invited Carsten to Oulu, Finland after reading his recap of his Julia workshop in Cologne, Germany here on Discourse. Our workshop then again hopefully encourages more than a few of us to contribute to Julia and travel to JuliaCon 2020, continuing this cycle. As I discussed with Carsten during his stay here, the initial contact for our collaboration likely would not have been made if the Julia community was not as interconnected as it is.
We’d like to thank the community for being as great as it is, and hopefully these kinds of opportunities will come to others here as well!
Cheers,
Veli-Jussi
