July 2024
Welcome to the new members! It’s great to see so many people interested in JuRSE and Research Software Engineering at Forschungszentrum Jülich. This newsletter’s purpose is to update you at the FZJ, national and international level in Research Software Engineering.
Please feel free to forward this to any colleagues who may be interested in this topic and in joining the JuRSE Community.
JuRSE news
Since our last newsletter we’ve been busy presenting JuRSE to the JuDocs members, at the IT Forum in the central library and most recently in IEK-4. We’re very happy to present JuRSE at a seminar series near you, so do get in touch.
Open Hours
You are invited to join us for our second topical Open Hour on Wednesday, July 3rd (11:00 in person and 14:00 online). This time, we will be chatting about Python package manager tools. Do you use any tools or techniques to manage the dependencies of your Python projects? Some tools for this include Poetry, Hatch, pip, and conda among others. This is an opportunity to learn from each other and expand our collective knowledge so everyone is welcome to join. If you have other unrelated topics or questions, feel free to come along as usual, and we will accommodate for that as well.
Alongside our topical Open Hour, we have our usual Open Hours every Wednesday in person and online which are a weekly informal discussion with the JuRSE team. We’re available to talk about your code, offer advice on any subject related to research software engineering, or you can raise an idea for the community of practice across FZJ.
Over the past few weeks, our team has been engaged in some good discussions with other FZJ researchers who have visited us. Some of the topics covered were methods for sharing and distributing Python code among team members, challenges connecting analysis and driver code to a measuring device, potential RSE themes to incorporate into a science workshop, and continuous benchmarking.
HiRSE Seminars
In June, we hosted two new seminars in the HiRSE series about Research Software Engineering coming of age and bridging the knowledge gap between research software engineers and software engineering research. You can view most of our previous seminars on our youtube channel. We’re off now for a summer break but back in the autumn.
Code of the Month
The JuRSE Team want to shine a spotlight on the diverse and excellent research software that is being primarily developed at Forschungszentrum Jülich and to do this we're showcasing one research software a month.
July’s Code of the Month is the Mission Support System from ICE-4.
Datalad is hiring!
The Psychoinformatics group at the Institute of Neuro-science and Medicine (INM7) at the Helmholtz Research Center in Jülich (Germany) is looking for a community manager and development coordinator. Read more
National initiatives
deRSE Community Platform
We have helped the deRSE, the German RSE Association, to relaunch their community platform which serves as the main place for anyone interested in research software engineering in Germany to meet others facing the same challenges. Anyone can join and it’s completely free.
International initiatives
New release of NumPy
After 18 years, they’re pleased to announce the new major release of NumPy and you can read all about it on this blog post.
Training for Research Software Engineers (RSEs) in HPC
Universe-HPC aims to define a training curriculum framework, spanning from undergraduate to continuing professional development level for Research Software Engineers (RSEs) specialising in high performance computing (HPC). Check out the training already developed.
RSE podcast episodes and interesting keynotes
AI/ML Tools for Science - Arfon Smith (Product Manager at Github)
Arfon Smith works on integrating AI into the core GitHub experience. He also works on bringing open source to academia by improving support for scholarly work on the platform. He recently gave one of the keynote talks at the Collaborations Workshop in the UK on AI/ML tools for science. (). The Collaborations Workshop has been a regular informal conference that has attracted Research Software Engineers from around the world including Germany. Arfon’s keynote is now on YouTube and we think it’s an interesting watch.
Code for Thought podcast
Code for Thought is a community podcast for research software engineers and researchers who code. It was created and produced by Peter Schmidt, a German living in London. He has been a research software engineer his whole career and now dedicates himself to bringing the diverse range of research software engineering to the forefront. He releases English and German language episodes on a regular schedule.
· In dieser letzten Folge vor den Sommerferien treffe ich mich mit Dr Iris Ehlert und Dr Hendryk Bockelmann, um mit ihnen über ihre Arbeit am natESM (nationale Erdmodellierungs Systeme) zu sprechen.
· In this last ByteSized RSE episode of this season, we talk about an important subject for Python engineers: Packaging. With my guests Liam Pattinson from York University (UK) and Laszlo Sranger from Hypergolic, we go through the standard Python tools as well as package managers such as Poetry.
There are 7 seasons of episodes to dip into so we recommend that you check it out and find an episode that might interest you. Also, if you have an idea for an episode, get in touch with us.
Upcoming RSE conferences
Join the largest annual conference organized around the Julia programming language in Eindhoven in July 2024 ‘Juliacon’. Tickets are still available.
The 23rd annual SciPy conference will be held at the Tacoma Convention Center, July 8-14, 2024 and has virtual passes. SciPy brings together attendees from industry, academia and government to showcase their latest projects, learn from skilled users and developers, and collaborate on code development.
RSECon24
A few days left to get a ticket to the first and largest RSE conference. The RSECon24 inthe UK is their 8th annual conference in September in Newcastle. Registration is now open until the end of June.
US RSECon24
Registration is open for the US RSE conference and Albuquerque is the location for the 2nd annual conference from October 15th to 17th. This year's theme is ‘Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: A celebration of all that RSEs have done for computing in the past, in the present, and in the future’.
European Carpentry Connect Event, 12-14 Nov, Heidelberg, Germany
The second European CarpentryConnect event will be held in Heidelberg on 12-14 November 2024 under the theme “Community-led training beyond academia” with the aim to bring the Carpentries and BioNT communities together to explore and discuss community-led software and data skills training as well as capacity building initiatives. Learn more about the event and the types of sessions that can be proposed in the announcement blog post.
Would you like a JuRSE poster?
You’ve made it all the way to the end of the newsletter, congratulations! Your reward is a JuRSE poster. If you’d like a poster, send an email to let us know and we’ll send it in internal post.