Teaching workflow systems to new users: why is it so hard?

WORKFLOWS COMMUNITY TALKS  > TEACHING WORKFLOW SYSTEMS TO NEW USERS: WHY IS IT SO HARD?

Teaching workflow systems to new users: why is it so hard?

Workflow systems as mirrors of computing complexity

C. Titus Brown (UC Davis)

September 24, 2025
11:00-12:00 PST / 14:00-15:00 EST / 20:00-21:00 CEST

I’ll discuss the challenges (and opportunities!) of teaching workflow systems to scientists, and present two concepts that I have found useful for guiding my teaching: (1) workflow systems as imperfect mirrors of practical computing, and (2) the Kernighan method for assessing lesson difficulty.

Titus blogs regularly on these topics at ivory.idyll.org/blog/. He has been teaching and training snakemake workflow development for a while and has a draft (incomplete) book introducing snakemake here: https://ngs-docs.github.io/2023-snakemake-book-draft/ - feel free to share! All of his software is open source at github.com/dib-lab/, and I am on Bluesky at @titus.idyll.org.

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About the Authors

C. Titus Brown

C. Titus Brown
Professor of Population Health & Reproduction

C. Titus Brown is a Professor in the School of Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis, where he works on methods in data intensive research across the biosciences, computer science, and software engineering. He is surprisingly passionate about open science and sociotechnical systems for community development of research infrastructure, and blogs regularly on these topics at ivory.idyll.org/blog/.