June 2024

Thanks for joining the JuRSE community and mailing list! It’s great to see so many people interested in JuRSE and Research Software Engineering at Forschungszentrum Jülich. This is the first JuRSE newsletter and we plan to send this about once a month, updating 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. Also, we’re very happy to present JuRSE at a seminar series near you, so do get in touch.

JuRSE news

The JuRSE website is fully up and running now with lots of information about Research Software Engineering, JuRSE activities, and resources to achieve the recommendations in the Software Guidelines.

Our newest feature is ‘Code of the Month’ and June’s Code of the Month is DataLad from INM-7. The JuRSE Team wants 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 awesome research software a month.

JuRSE Open Hours are a weekly informal discussion both in person and online 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.

NEW! Every first Wednesday of the month we’re initiating a new series of "topical Open Hour" sessions where we explore various RSE relevant topics. Our first session will take place on Wednesday June 5th, where we will converse about Make. Make is a popular tool for compiling codes and managing dependencies, but it can also be used to automate your scientific workflows. Some of the possible discussion points are how to use Make in your scientific project. Have you created/used Makefiles? If so, what are your experiences?  What other similar tools do you use (for example: CMake, Snakemake, shell scripts)? This is an opportunity to learn from each other and expand our collective knowledge, so everyone is welcome to join.

The JuRSE Community has an FZJ rocketchat channel where we network and share news. You can also join the deRSE community platform on matrix.

National initiatives

On the 16th May, the DFG released a new call about a funding programme that facilitates the ‘Development of Infrastructures for Research Software’ and the deRSE Association have organised a Q&A session about the process with a DFG representative for the 6th June.

The Helmholtz Research Software Directory is an initiative to promote the impact, re-use, and citation of research software. We encourage people to add their research software to the RSD and you can browse the FZJ research software already in the directory at this featured link.

Upcoming RSE conferences

RSE Summer School
The first Summer School on Research Software Engineering, hosted by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology is taking place from September 23 to 27, 2024. Spaces are still available so apply before the end of May.
If you want to learn about essential RSE topics such as collaborative coding, software publication and licensing, continuous integration and testing, documentation as code and more...then this is the right event for you. The event is aiming at participants, who already have a basic level of understanding of the concepts and are eager to learn more about RSE. We are looking for attendees with their own codes and who are willing to use the skills learned during the courses right away for their everyday work.

RSECon24
The RSE Community has been going for much longer in the UK so they are hosting their 8th annual conference in September in Newcastle. Registration is now open until the end of June. It’s a whole week along with satellite events on the Monday and Friday so check out the website to see if you want to attend.

US RSECon24
Albuquerque is the location for the 2nd annual conference of the US RSE Association 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’.  Submission is still possible for papers, notebooks, poster and talks with the deadline of Monday 3rd June.

Would you like a JuRSE poster?

You’ve made it all the way to the end of the first 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.

If you have an idea for the newsletter, please get in touch with Claire Wyatt, Community Manager for Research Software Engineering at Forschungszenbtrum Jülich.