January 2026

Happy New Year! Welcome everyone to the JuRSE newsletter for January 2026!

 

JuRSE (Jülich Research Software Engineering) is a grassroots community for all FZJ scientists and students who code and 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:

JuRSE 

New Year’s Message from Community Manager, Claire Wyatt: We want to thank our community for another year of growth and collaboration. This past year, our community continued to grow, we have an active community on the #rse Rocket.Chat channel with over 260 members, we maintained regular support through our open hours, and celebrated the excellent work happening across FZJ with our Code of the Month highlights. Our training series helped strengthen RSE skills with the goal of improving research outcomes throughout the centre and we enjoyed seeing many of you at conferences and other events around campus and throughout Germany. Looking ahead to 2026, we're excited to build on this foundation. We'll be surveying the community to better understand your needs, launching regular meet-ups, and continuing to support the vital work you do. Thank you for being part of JuRSE. Here's to another year of excellent research software engineering!

JuRSE is now on Linkedin! Connect with us here

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.
Take the survey here!

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. In December, we were for example discussing how a collection of GitLab projects can be streamlined via templates and musing about strategies on publishing code on PyPI.

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 first code pick of 2026 is hermes, an open-source Python package that implements the HERMES (“HElmholtz Rich MEtadata Software publication”) workflows for automating the publication of research software combined with rich metadata. By following a push-based model with continuous integration, it helps overcome limitations of platform-centric pull-based services and grants its users full control over the publication process and the metadata compiled for the publication. hermes is co-developed at the Central Library (ZB) and funded by the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC).
Find out more about the JuRSE Code of the Month here.

HiRSE 

HiRSE is now on Linkedin! Connect with us here

HiRSE Seminar Series

Join us at our next HiRSE Seminar, “MLTE: A process and tool for test and evaluation of machine learning models” on 15th January at 15:00 CET where we will hear from Alex Derr from the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
Learn more here

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  

deRSE26 Conference is right around the corner! Registration is now open – we hope to see many of you there!  The full program is now available and you will find: 77 Talks, 79 Poster, 13 Demos, 4 Tutorials, 10 Workshop, BoFs, Meet-Ups.  One day prior to deRSE26, the University of Stuttgart hosts a Research Software Day, targeted at the university's employees, students and the interested public.  If you are a deRSE26 contributor, you can also present your work here.  On Thursday afternoon, you can take the opportunity of a guided tour of the Computer Museum, HLRS, one of the Top-3 HPC Centers in Germany - VISUS, the visualization center of Stuttgart. On Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon, various meet-ups take place. So maybe you find one for your particular community? 

FutuRSI, a joint initiative supported by six partner institutions to conceptualise a German research software institution, often releases blog post and position papers. The latest blog post is "Research Software on the Rise – What the GI Festival Panel Revealed”.

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

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 here

Recommended Reading & Tools

RSE Podcast Episodes

We wish you a good start to 2026 and if you’d like anything feature in the JuRSE newsletter, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Last Modified: 11.06.2026