The evolution of the Software Underground

The Software Underground started as a mailing list in 2014 with maybe twenty participants, in the wake of the first geoscience hackathons. There are now more than 2,160 “rocks + computers” enthusiasts in the Underground, with about 20 currently joining every week. It’s the fastest growing digital subsurface water-cooler in the world! And the only one.

The beating heart of the Software Underground is its free, open Slack chat room. Accessible to anyone, it brings this amazing community right to your mobile device or computer desktop. When it comes to the digital subsurface, it has a far higher signal:noise ratio than LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. Here are some of the topics under discussion this week:

• The role of coding challenges in job interviews.

• Handling null values in 2D grids such as airborne gamma-ray.

• How to load an open seismic dataset into OpendTect.

• A new series of tutorials for the GeoStats.jl Julia package.

• Plenty of discussion about how to interpret negative oil prices!

But the Software Underground — or Swung as its population affectionately call it — is more than just a chatroom. It organizes events. It compiles awesome documents. And it has great ambitions.

Evolution

To better explore those ambitions, the Underground is evolving.

Until now, it’s had a slightly murky existence, or non-existence, operating in mysterious ways and without visible means of support. When we tried to get a ‘non-profit’ booth at a conference last year, we couldn’t because the Software Underground isn’t just a non-profit, it’s a non-entity. It doesn’t legally exist.

Most of the time, this nonexistence is a luxury. No committees! No accounts! No lawyers!

But sometimes it’s a problem. Like when you want to accept donations in a transparent way. Or take sponsorship from a corporation. Or pay for an event venue. Or have some accountability for what goes on in the community. Or make a decision without waiting for Matt to read his email. Sometimes it matters.

A small band of supporters and evangelists have decided the time has come for the Software Underground to stand up and be counted! We’re going legal. We’re going to exist.

What will change?

As little as possible! And everything!

The Slack will remain the same. Free for everyone. The digital subsurface water-cooler (or public house, if you prefer).

We’re taking on our biggest event yet in June — a fully online conference called TRANSFORM 2020. Check it out.

Soon we will exist legally, as we move to incorporate in Canada as a non-profit. Later, we can think about how membership and administration will work. For now, there will be some ‘interim’ directors, whose sole job is to establish the terms of the organization’s existence and get it to its first Annual General Meeting, sometime in 2021.

The goal is to make new things possible, with a new kind of society.

And you’re invited.

Geoscientist, challenge thyself

No costume is required for solving geocomputing kata

One of the highlights of my year is the Advent of Code, a sort of advent calendar for nerds. Its creator, Eric Wastl (hear his story), releases a new puzzle every day from the 1st of the month up to Christmas day. And the productivity of the global developer community goes down 74%.

Ever since the first one I tried, I’ve been wondering what geological coding challenges might look like. And now, 18 months later… well, I still don’t know, but I’ve made some anyway!

Puzzle number 1 (or 0)

Here’s how the first one starts:

You have a string of lithology codes, reading from the bottom up of a geological section. There is a sample every metre. There are three lithologies:

• Mudstone
• Fine sandstone or siltstone
• Sandstone

The strings look like this:

    ...MFFSSFSSSS...

Your data, when you receive it, will be much longer than this.

We need to get some geological information from this string of codes. Specifically, you need to answer 3 questions:

1. What is the total thickess in metres of sandstone (S)? Each sample represents one metre.
2. How many sandstone beds are there? A bed is a contiguous group of one lithology, so MMFFF is 2 beds, one of M and one of F.
3. How many times does the most common upwards bed transition occur? Do not include transitions from a lithology to itself.

You can download your own personal dataset, which in this case has 20,000 lithology codes. Then you can try to answer the questions, one at a time. You can use any programming language — indeed, any method at all — to solve the problems, you give an answer back to the server, and it will tell you if you are correct or not.

There are, as of right now, five ‘chapters’, covering topics from naming rock samples to combining map layers. You will receive the name of the next chapter when you correctly answer the final question of the three or four in each challenge.

If you’d like to give it a try, there’s a live starter Jupyter notebook here:

https://ageo.co/kata-live

Or, if you prefer, there’s a static notebook at https://ageo.co/kata, or you can dive directly into the web API for the first challenge: https://kata.geosci.ai/challenge/sequence

Do let us know how you get on!

Training and hackathons are moving online

A while back, I announced that we’re running some public courses in June. These courses will now be online.

They have also decreased in price by 33% because we don’t need a physical space or physical sandwiches. So the 3-day Intro to Geocomputing class now costs only USD 1200 (or $300 for students). The 2-day Intro to Machine Learning class, which is only available on the Americas timing for now, is USD 800, or USD 600 if you take both classes.

The really nice thing is that because they have no physical location, you can take part from anywhere! Well, anywhere with good Internet. Both courses are still running the week of 1 June, and there are a few places left on both courses.

More info:

• Online course with timing for the Americas.

• Online course with timing for Europe and Africa.

The hackathons are going online too

We’re also involved in some public hackathons that are moving online. Both events will now also be FREE.

On 30 April and 1 May, we’re running a (very experimental) online Geothermal Hackathon. If you’re into hot rocks, or just want to hack on open data and new problems for a couple of days, you should join us! I can’t tell you much about what we’ll be doing though. It depends a lot on who shows up at the start, and what they want to do. You can join the conversation ahead of time on Software Underground — look for the #geothermal channel.

Later, from 6 to 14 June (yep, not a typo) the Software Underground will be hosting a multi-day, muti-modal, multi-mayhem digital subsurface festival. No, I don’t really know what that means… but I know it’s going to be awesome. Again, the conversation is happening on Software Underground — hunt down the #global-hack-2020 channel.

Check back here soon for more about this brand new kind of event.