# What to Expect 

Our hackweeks focus on applied, hands-on learning, with participants engaging in
extended periods of small-group work. Our tutorials are designed to offer a broad
snapshot of data science tools to support your applied investigations. Due to the
relatively short duration of our events, we are not able to provide comprehensive,
in-depth training in fundamental tools. Rather, our goal is to inform you about
the types of tools we think are best suited to working with your datasets,
leaving details of implementation to be supported through peer-learning and
office hours.

## Typical Workflows and Tools

Here are a few specific scenarios of how hackweek participants typically engage
with data science tools during an event:

* Connecting to a [Jupyter Notebook](https://jupyter.org/) environment and using
  the command line to pull lesson content for a morning of tutorial training.
* Modifying a text file, committing it to Git and pushing changes to GitHub, for
  others on your team to view and edit.
* Opening CSV tabular data in Pandas and using filtering functions to remove
  outliers.
* Accessing a cloud-hosted remote sensing image using Rasterio and plotting it
  on an interactive map.
* Exploring multi-dimensional climate grids using xarray.

These are examples of the types of activities we do at a hackweek in a
collaborative setting. We invite you to reflect on your comfort level with tasks
such as these so that you can arrive at the hackweek with a clarity on where to
dedicate your energy. If wish to focus more energy on learning and implementing
new tools, we will support you with helpers and office hours, and you may have a
bit less time for applied group work. If you are already proficient in a lot of
tools you may find you can dedicate more energy to applied project work, which
we support through facilitated group activities.

## Prerequisites

All tutorials and project work will assume participants are familiar with Python-based
computing in the geosciences as described on the 
[Pythia Foundations](https://foundations.projectpythia.org/landing-page.html) website. 
 We can provide resources to participants wishing to brush up on their skills before
an event, however we will not be teaching these core concepts during the hackweek.