27/04/2020
Hacky Hours at Queensland universities have mostly moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic.
UQ, QUT, Griffith, USQ and CQU all have online Hacky Hours, held at their regular times (see the schedule below).
CQU’s Hacky Hour had become fully online this year anyway, despite the pandemic.
Instead of a video-conferencing session, JCU’s Hacky Hour is using a Slack workspace during the pandemic.
All JCU researchers and helpers are welcome to drop into the Slack workspace for advice or offer their IT expertise to help others. Questions may be submitted, and the channel checked for answers at any time.
“If we need to provide a further one-on-one service, we can go from there,” said QCIF’s JCU-based eResearch Analyst, Chantelle Pinnington.
The JCU Slack workspace will also feature information about upcoming training, workshops and events.
JCU also has a R programming group called the CodeR-TSV group, which meets online each Monday, 11am–12pm.
Likewise, UQ has a R User Group. During the pandemic, the group is currently experimenting with a chatroom for questions about R. People can login in with their UQ credentials and the UQRUG team will try to answer the questions.
Online Queensland Hacky Hours:
- JCU, Mondays, 11am–12pm (for R issues only), or use the Slack workspace for general enquiries at any time
- USQ, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 12pm–1pm
- UQ, Tuesdays, 3pm–4pm
- CQU, second and fourth Wednesday of each month, 2pm–3pm
- QUT, Thursdays, 2pm–3pm
- Griffith, Thursdays, 2pm–3pm.
For further information about your university’s Hacky Hour, please visit our website.
The aim of Hacky Hour is to help researchers (staff and students) with research-related IT problems. It’s free, informal and all researchers are welcome to drop in online for advice or offer their IT expertise to help others.
Popular topics for discussion include high-performance computing (HPC), cloud computing, general programming, R, Python, data processing, data storage and data management.