The fourth edition of the Starterkit was a special one. It was held between 30th October to 3rd December and, for the very first time, ALICE joined LHCb for the first two days making this the first intercollaboration Starterkit! The extended Starterkit team would like to thank all the participants for their enthusiasm, their ability to find well hidden CERN rooms and for the useful feedback they provided.

With 49 participants from LHCb and 25 from ALICE, we set a new record for participation while keeping the small groups and the level of interactivity that makes the Starterkit special. In the first two days, the participants were taught the basics of widely used tools and programming languages. On the agenda was Python, the bash shell and command line tools, followed by version control with Git. The next three days were dedicated to experiment specific data analysis software.

On Thursday evening, an enormous pizza party allowed the participants to start networking while having food and drinks with the teachers, helpers and organizers. We had an amazing time!

The Starterkit 2017 pizza party

Feedback

Once more, the participants have been very encouraging in their feedback. They enjoyed the clarity and the structure of the courses and they received very useful help from the teachers and helpers. In the Python, Bash and Git lessons, the students appreciated the new material that is now available on line following previous year’s feedback. The LHCb specific lessons were praised for the high quality of the material and the structure.

Well structured, clear communication, many checks whether everyone was keeping up, all questions answered well, a lot of material but didn’t seem too dense

Participants also suggested us some ways to improve. In the first two days, they found the teaching a bit too slow, and then slightly too fast on the second part of the week. They would have liked to have more experienced teachers for some specific lessons. As usual there were requests for better rooms, which despite of all our efforts, some of which were too small and would have benefited from having more plugs and a better internet connection.

I would like to see more tricks with DaVinci and Ganga

The people

The Starterkit would not be what it is without the incredible number of people who give their time and dedication to organize it, to contribute to the lessons on the analysis essentials or on the first analysis steps, to teach and to help.

The organization of this year’s Starterkit was in the hands of Chris Burr and Violaine Bellée, who have been joined in their efforts by the ALICE organizers Dario Berzano and Redmer Bertens. On top of booking the rooms, defining the agenda, sending emails, coordinating the lesson writing, the teaching and helping, and scratching their heads to find pizzas for over a hundred people; they have also walked several marathons within CERN to check that all participants were being taken care of properly.

This year, we have also had a remarkable amount of people volunteering to teach, either to renew an experience from previous workshops, or to have the chance to share their knowledge for the first time. We are very grateful for the time they spent preparing the lessons, and for their efforts to make everything as clear and precise as possible

  • Albert Puig Navarro
  • Alex Pearce
  • Ana Trisovic
  • Andrii Usachov
  • Carlos Vazquez Sierra
  • Dario Berzano
  • Gediminias Sarpis
  • Giulio Dujany
  • Lennaert Bel
  • Lorenzo Capriotti
  • Matteo Concas
  • Maximiliano Puccio
  • Michael Wilkinson
  • Violaine Bellée
  • Vitalii Lisovskyi

A key point to the Starterkit concept, the helpers are here to make sure that problems don’t pile up and that participants can make the most of the lessons. Among the helpers, many have attended the previous workshops and consider it’s their turn to build an atmosphere of mutual assistance. All of them have received a huge approbation from the participants in their feedback

  • Alex Pearce
  • Ana Trisovic
  • Andrii Usachov
  • Benedetto Siddi
  • Biplab Dey
  • Brice Maurin
  • Carlos Vazquez Sierra
  • Chris Burr
  • Dario Berzano
  • Federico Betti
  • Graeme Stewart
  • Jennifer Zonneveld
  • Jiyoung Kim
  • Lauren Douglas
  • Lennaert Bel
  • Lorenzo Capriotti
  • Matthieu Marinangeli
  • Maxime Schubiger
  • Maximiliano Puccio
  • Michael Wilkinson
  • Pavol Stefko
  • Redmer Bertens
  • Roel Aaij
  • Sascha Stahl
  • Violaine Bellée
  • Vitalii Lisovskyi

The Starterkit team 2017

The lessons

Clear and up-to-date material for the lessons is essential to our workshops. This year, the first-analysis-steps repository has been greatly enriched while the analysis-essentials repository has been created to host the Python, Bash and git lessons as well as additional generic knowledge and useful tips. We owe a lot to the contributors who have carried out this huge amount of work since the last Starterkit.

  • Albert Puig Navarro
  • Alex Pearce
  • Chris Burr
  • Dario Berzano
  • Lorenzo Capriotti
  • Michael Wilkinson
  • Sascha Stahl
  • Violaine Bellée
  • Vitalii Lisovskyi

One last word

Once again, we can’t thank enough all of our contributors, helpers, teachers and organisers. Thanks to their dedication, their skill and their willingness to share it, this 2017 Starterkit edition in which both ALICE and LHCb took part, was a huge success. This achievement will hopefully pave the way to new collaborative training for researchers in their early career.