December 2025

Welcome everyone to the JuRSE newsletter for December!

JuRSE (Jülich Research Software Engineering) is a grassroots community for all FZJ scientists and students who code and/or anyone interested in research software.

The purpose of this newsletter is to update you about JuRSE community initiatives at FZJ and some of the national and international activities in Research Software Engineering (RSE) and inspire you to get involved in the community.  Please feel free to forward this to any colleagues who may be interested in this topic and in joining the JuRSE Community.

Two quick ways you can get involved:

• Join the RSE Rocketchat channel open to all FZJ staff
• Join the national RSE Community on matrix hosted by the de-RSE Association.

JuRSE

JuRSE is now on Linkedin! Connect with us

JuRSE Survey

We want to hear from you! Are you coding in your research role at Forschungszentrum Jülich? The Jülich Research Software Engineering (JuRSE) team is reaching out to you to better understand your work, challenges, and needs. Your insights will directly shape the resources, services, and events we provide for our coding community at FZJ.

Open Hours

We host Open Hours every Wednesday both in-person in the gegenüber lounge in the ZB and online. All are welcome to come and talk to us about anything. This is an opportunity to learn from each other and expand our collective knowledge.

Code of the Month

The JuRSE Team wants to shine a spotlight on the diverse and excellent research software that is being developed at Forschungszentrum Jülich. The code pick of December 2025 is ChASE (Chebyshev Accelerated Subspace Eigensolver) co-developed at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. ChASE is a modern and scalable library based on subspace iteration with polynomial acceleration to solve dense Hermitian (symmetric) and pseudo-Hermitian algebraic eigenvalue problems. The library is fully parallelised and is particularly effective for sequences of eigenproblems as they often arise in electronic structure theory. Evolving from an internal work horse to a community code, this code made it to an explicit shout-out during the PoF-4 review ("breakthrough", "superior performance", "widely adopted by the scientific community"). The developers do a great job showcasing their achievements and advocating for their code in the right ways and the right places. Besides writing great code, too, of course. Their experience with ChASE led to the ExaNLA initiative a moonsot project for establishing an open-source, high-performance, scalable, and portable dense numerical linear algebra package ready for Exascale systems. Find out more on the JuRSE website.

JuRSE Training

There is still a chance to join one of our trainings before of the end of the year:

• “Apptainer – platform for container based scientific workflows” – Tuesday, December 9^th 10-12 online. Register here.

Blog Posts

• “From Physicist to RSE – My Journey to USRSE’25 in Philadelphia”
• “FZJ at the Helmholtz Codes! Workshop”

HiRSE 

HiRSE is now on Linkedin! Connect with us

HiRSE Seminar Series

Join us at our next HiRSE Seminar, “Before Distributing Research Software - Impulses from an RSE&TTO-Perspective” on 12^th December at 10:30am where we will hear from Dirk Feuchter from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

Helmholtz Research Software Directory

The Research Software Directory is where you can promote and discover research software from Helmholtz centres. After recent updates to the directory, you can now nominate yourself for a spotlight on their website to showcase your research software and they've introduced some more functionality to make integration easier. Check out the details here.

National Initiatives  

• FutuRSI, a joint initiative supported by six partner institutions to conceptualise a German research software institution, is releasing a series of blog posts and articles and the latest are available here:
• “Proven national and international reference models point the way forward”
• “A national research software institution can be seamlessly integrated into the German research ecosystem”
• “Key issues paper on general challenges, specific needs and possible solutions published”

• HiDA Mobility Program: The HIDA Mobility Program enables short-term research stays (1- 3 months) for all Helmholtz doctoral researchers and postdocs (employed at or affiliated with a Helmholtz Center), whose work is linked to (applied) data and information sciences. Applications are now being accepted on an ongoing basis.

• HIFIS: Did you know that HIFIS has many great resources available including software engineering consulting services? Take a few minutes to browse the website.

Recommended Reading & Tools

• The Advent of Code is back!
• Another fun one!
• “Stop treating code like an afterthought: record, share and value it”
• “Open Science – Source Code and Software:”
• “Is AI After My Job? Navigating the Future of Research Software Engineering”
• Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration
• ESOC Report: Implementing Pixi Extensions
• “Peer Code Review in Research Software Development: The Research Software Engineer Perspective”
• Pixi: Unified Software Development and Distribution for Robotics and AI
• Physics needs research software engineers
• The Silent Scientist: When Software Research Fails to Reach Its Audience
• “Supporting Computational Science and Engineering: The Creation of Widely Used Software in Industrial and Applies Mathematics”
• “How to Update Community Health Files with AI”
• “Ten Simple Rules for AI-Assisted Coding in Science”

RSE Podcast Episodes

• “PyMoDAQ: No more reinventing the wheel - with Sébastien Weber”
• “Getting to grips with the Coding Interview - Mike Mroczka”
• “Publishing with Quarto”
• “How AI will change software engineering – with Martin Fowler” from the Pragmatic Engineer"

—

Further Training Opportunities

HiDA Training courses

There are lots of courses available to you for free from Helmholtz Information & Data Science Academy (HIDA) so check out what's available.

 Training at FZJ: 

• Accelerating Massive Data Processing in Python with Heat

Dates: 12-16 January 2026, 13:55-16:30

Registration: https://plan.events.mpg.de/event/531/registrations/598/

That’s it for this year for our newsletters but you can still hear from us and join in the conversation on the RSE Rocketchat channel and come along to our Open Hours in the ZB on Wednesdays or online. 

We wish you a restful Christmas holiday and we look forward to growing our RSE Community with you even more in 2026.