June 2025
Welcome everyone to the JuRSE newsletter for June!
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 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 and you can also
- Join the national RSE Community on matrix hosted by the deRSE Association.
JuRSE NEWS
In our most recent blog post on ‘The Latest’, we discuss the options for ‘Should I publish in the Journal of Open Source Software?'
Open Hours (every Wednesday)
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 so everyone is welcome to join. In the last month, we were happy to have had some nice conversations with researchers at various FZJ institutes. Some researchers joined our open hours to provide feedback on our trainings, discuss JuGit and Jülich Data, and Zenodo integration with GitHub. We also talked about approaches to publishing code used in papers, and ways to recognize the researchers code contributions, including software citation. That’s why we are here! Come join us for one of the next Open Hours!
JuRSE Code of the Month
Each month the JuRSE Team highlights a code primarily developed at Forschungszentrum Jülich and this month’s code is co-developed at the Institute of Bio and Geosciences, Agrosphere (IBG-3) and at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC). This month, check out SERGHEI: The Simulation EnviRonment for Geomorphology, Hydrodynamics and Ecohydrology in Integrated form (SERGHEI) is a multi-dimensional, multi-domain, and multi-physics model framework for environmental and landscape simulation, intended to simulate water flow and transport across landscape scales. Click through to our website to find out what the JuRSE team like about this software.
Training: Speeding up software development with AI (Working with Copilot)
- Join us on Thursday 10th July at 10am CEST for a course to learn and discuss the fundamentals of Large Language Models (LLMs) for developing software. In hands-on sessions, you will learn how to set up VSCode to use with Github Copilot and other open-source AI-coding assistants and practice using its functionalities to speed up and improve writing code. Space is limited, please register.
HiRSE NEWS
The JuRSE team work closely with the HiRSE project so we include their news here too.
43rd HiRSE Seminar - ‘Leveraging Earth System Science to Exascale’
Join us Thursday 5th June at 2pm CEST for the 43rd HiRSE Seminar where Sabine Grießbach from Jülich Supercomputing Centre (FZJ) will talk about ‘Leveraging Earth System Science to Exascale’ and the German National Earth System Modelling Support Team. No registration needed, more information here.
More speakers needed! We’re always looking for more speakers for this seminar series so please email Claire (cl.wyatt@fz-juelich.de) if you have a suggestion.
Helmholtz Codes! Workshop - 4th to 6th November 2025 – Berlin
HiRSE, HIFIS, and HIDA are hosting a 3-day invitation-only workshop for people writing and maintaining research software within Helmholtz. During this event, we will discuss options on how Helmholtz could further support our daily work in research software engineering. Together, the participants will envision three scenarios:
1. What if there is no additional money coming in for research software?
2. What if we had a huge amount of money waiting for us?
3. What if this amount were small(er)?
More info about the workshop can be found here (registration is invitation-only for code authors listed in the Helmholtz Research Software Directory, get in touch if you think you should have received an invitation).
HIDA Training courses
- Check out all the relevant courses for research software engineering on the HIDA course catalogue.
NATIONAL INITIATIVES
Good RSE News: Dr. Guido Juckeland, head of the Computational Science Department at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), has been appointed honorary professor at the Facutly of Computer Science at TU Dresden. He will be responsible for teaching the subject of “Research Software Engineering."
Helmholtz Call for Project Proposals published: ‘ScienceServe – Boosting Research Software at Helmholtz’
Helmholtz has announced the launch of a new call for proposals to promote the development of research software at Helmholtz, funded by the Helmholtz Initiative and Networking Fund. Building on important existing initiatives and activities, this call supports projects that drive innovation, promote exchange between developers and scientists, and foster good practices in the field of research software.
The call is open to Helmholtz researchers, software engineers, and teams affiliated with Helmholtz centers. Funded projects will be connected to strong networks within the Helmholtz Association. The aim of this call is to support projects that significantly improve the quality, sustainability, reusability, and visibility of research software at Helmholtz.
The call has been published on April 28, 2025, with funding available for projects in 2026. Deadline for formal submissions will be June 30, but note that due to the supporting letters required from the board of directors, the internal deadline is June 13. Please get in touch with Sven Rank and Dorit Jerger from UE if you plan to submit a proposal. Detailed information about the call.
INTERNATIONAL INITIATIVES
The US RSE Society June Community Call will be all about AI in Research Software Engineering on Friday, June 13, at 2pm ET which is 8pm CEST.
The community call is looking to share how the RSE Community is using these tools today to write code, check code, or otherwise help out in our roles as RSEs. What do they mean for our job? How are they best deployed? Do they create trustworthy code? Or maybe you use them for research rather than for creating code for research? What do they mean for the next generation of research software engineers? These and so many more questions will be discussed. Join and share your experiences and opinions! You can register for the community call.
Research Participation: Interviews with RSEs on Peer Code Review in Research Software Development - If you are a research software engineer (RSE) and want to share your experiences with peer code review, consider joining our 15–20 minute interview. Dr. Jeffrey Carver, Dr. Nasir Eisty, and Md Ariful Malik from the University of Alabama are conducting a study to explore the code review process used by Research Software Engineers. If you are interested in being interviewed, please fill out this short information form so we can contact you to schedule an interview.
RSE PODCAST EPISODES
- Parsl: a Python library for parallel programming - with Dan Katz and Ben Clifford - Parallel programming is hard. Say Hi to Parsl, a Python library and tool that aims to make the task a bit easier. Peter Schmidt spoke with two of the key people on the project, Dan Katz and Ben Clifford.
- Software entwickeln mit KI? Ein Gespräch mit Carina Haupt und Chris Stenkamp - Carina Haupt und Christoph Steinkamp vom DLR beschäftigen sich mit der Frage, inwieweit der Einsatz von Large Language Models (wie z.B. ChatGPT) bei Forschungsprojekten und deren Softwareentwicklung helfen? [in German]
- Pandoc: a swiss-army knife for documents - with J MacFarlane, A Krewinkel - Learn about the history and development of Pandoc - this very popular Swiss-army knife for digital documents and document publishing.
- Let’s Go Atomic (with Design) - Brad Frost - Brad Frost is the author of a book called Atomic Design, in which he tries to help UI/UX designers improve their workflow and approach and create digital apps.
RECOMMENDED READING
- Research Software Discovery: How do we Want to Search Research Software and Where do we Want to Find it? A deRSE25 workshop report.
RECOMMENDED WATCHING
- Check out the official trailer to Python: The Documentary
UPCOMING EVENTS
- Webinar: Practical Software Citation for Research Software Developers, Maintainers and Users – June 4th 17:00-18:00 - This webinar will provide a practical introduction to software citation for developers, maintainers, and users of research software. The first part of the webinar will introduce the principles of software citation and current good practices for making software citable with the help of metadata formats, tools, and infrastructure. The second part will provide examples for a tool-based workflow for citing software, and how to find relevant metadata and deal with missing metadata.
- Workshop: Successful & Beautiful Poster Presentations – June 5th 14:00-15:00 Scientific posters are an integral part of presenting your research. However, condensing all findings on just one canvas is truly challenging. This 1h crash course is designed for graduate and post graduate students. It covers the topics on reflecting on the message you want to get across, on how to design a beautiful poster and how to prepare a successful poster presentation.
- PyData London Conference – June 6-8 2025 - PyData is a community about data science, and their yearly conference has attendees from academia and industry. It’s a great way to get a view outside the academic bubble and pick up on new tools and techniques.
- RSEHPC@ISC25 Workshop: Tools and Techniques for Continuous Integration and Benchmarking, 13th June 2025, ISC, Hamburg - It has long been understood that there is a strong overlap between the fields of HPC and RSE. Although the two are not entirely congruent, the techniques used and the communities are closely interlinked. Three keynotes will set the stage for the workshop, showing what has been achieved so far and how Cx plays a vital role for running, procuring, and planning HPC machines.
- RSECon25 – Warwick, UK - 9th-11th September – Registrations now open! Don’t miss your chance to attend the original RSE Conference. The ninth annual conference for Research Software Engineering (RSECon25) will be hosted at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK from 9-11 September 2025.
- US-RSE’25 - 6-8 October, Phildadelphia, USA ‘Code, Practices, and People’ - the third annual conference from the United States Research Software Engineer Association (US-RSE), to be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 6-8, 2025. Call for submissions is open now as is the JuRSE Travel grant applications (see above).