May 2025

Welcome everyone to the JuRSE newsletter for May!

JuRSE (Jülich Research Software Engineering) is a grassroots community for all FZJ scientists and students who code and/or anyone interested in research software. (https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse)

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 (https://chat.fz-juelich.de/invite/krTNBT)

·         Join the national RSE Community on matrix (https://matrix.to/#/#de-rse.org:matrix.org ) hosted by the de-RSE Association.

JuRSE news

Open Hours (every Wednesday - https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/community-initiatives/jurse-open-hours)

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. This month’s discussions included Python packaging, alternatives to PyPI for sharing private Python packages, places to host documentation websites, the availability of Windows runners, and challenges in counting software publications in evaluation reviews. That’s why we are here! Come join us for one of the next Open Hours!

JuRSE Code of the Month

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 research software a month. This month’s code is developed at the Institute of Neurosciences and Medicine, Brain and Behaviour (INM-7).

Julearn aims to provide an easy-to-use but flexible interface to build predictive models with cross-validation (CV) consistent performance estimates. It poses as a solution accessible to domain experts without extensive ML training, enabling them to quickly fit and evaluate ML algorithms. Learn more on our website:https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/community-initiatives/jurse-code-of-the-month/may-2025

HiRSE News

The JuRSE team works closely with the HiRSE project so we include their news here too.https://www.helmholtz-hirse.de/

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 with you, we would like to 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:  https://events.hifis.net/event/2329/

42nd HiRSE Seminar – ‘The Young deRSE Award Winners’

Join us on Thursday 15th May 11am CEST to hear from the winners of the ‘Young deRSE Award’ from 2023, 2024 and 2025.  Yudong Sun, winner for 2023, will talk about ‘Modularity in Software-Hardware Interaction for Experimental Physics, an Example’.  Florian Sihler, winner of 2024 will talk about ‘flowR: A Program Slicer for the R Programming Language’. Anna Lena Schaible will present on ‘Fast GPU-powered and auto-differentiable forward modeling for cosmological hydrodynamical simulations’. More information here: https://www.helmholtz-hirse.de/series.html

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.

Promoting research software: Made in Germany

We now have 77 codes in this initiative. Check out the codes that are already taking part in this campaign: https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/community-initiatives/the-hirse-code-promotion

What is this initiative all about? Researchers, postdocs, and students at German universities and research centres write great research software. The HiRSE team wants to make that more visible by bringing your software to the attention of the RSE Community and beyond. We're looking for research software created, extended and/or maintained by people working at German institutions to join our latest initiative. This is not meant exclusively, we of course welcome also software written by international teams, as long as there is a substantial contribution coming from Germany.

Here is our offer: You provide us with the details of your software using our form https://go.fzj.de/research_software_promotion and we'll create your promo slide that will be shown ahead of a HiRSE Seminar and during HiRSE event breaks. If you have more ideas where this slide can be used, feel free to let us know (and use it yourself, of course)!

If you have any questions or would like to suggest a project that is not your own, please do not hesitate to contact us under hirse@fz-juelich.de.

HIDA Training courses

Check out all the relevant courses for research software engineering on the HIDA course catalogue like Data Processing, Continuous Integration, Graphics with R and lots more: https://www.helmholtz-hida.de/course-catalog/en/

National Initiatives

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 submissions will be June 30. Detailed information about the call is available at: https://www.helmholtz.de/en/research/current-calls-for-applications/article/scienceserve-boosting-research-software-at-helmholtz/

An information session on May 06, from 09:30 to 11:00 CET, will provide details about the call and explain how interested Helmholtz members can participate. Register for the information event here: https://events.hifis.net/e/ScienceServe

HeFDI Code School: Sustainable Research Software (EN) in May

The HeFDI Code School meets the needs of researchers for further training in the field of software development. All workshops are free-of-charge. https://www.uni-marburg.de/en/hefdi/data-events/code-school2025

RSE podcast episodes

  • ‘How do AI assistants help with coding? Do they?’ Hear from Peter Schmidt and Jianliang Gao  (Imperial College, London) about using AI assistants for coding and  teaching. https://codeforthought.buzzsprout.com

A new recommendation: ‘Sustain’

Sustain brings together practitioners, sustainers, funders, researchers and maintainers of the open source ecosystem. We have conversations about the health and sustainability of the open source community. We learn about the ins and outs of what ‘open source’ entails in the real world. Open source means so much more than a license; we're interested in talking about how to make sure that the culture of open source continues, grows, and ultimately, sustains itself. https://podcast.sustainoss.org/episodes

  • Helen Pearson et al.’s article in  Nature, "Exclusive: The Most-Cited Papers of the Twenty-First Century," highlights the significant impact of research software on scientific progress. It reveals that some of the most-cited papers since 2000 are those that introduce widely adopted software tools and computational methods.​ As the authors observe, “the most highly cited papers generally aren’t the most famous scientific discoveries. Rather, these works tend to describe scientific methods or software, the workhorses on which scientists depend.”https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01125-9 / doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-01125-9

Upcoming events

Nordic-RSE, Sweden - May 20-21, 2025
The 2025 edition of the Nordic-RSE conference will be held in Gothenburg on May 20-21 approximately 9-17 CEST. If you are interested in Research Software Engineering and want to connect with the community in the Nordics, you are warmly encouraged to join.

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. Read more: https://www.helmholtz-hirse.de/events/2025_06_13-rsehpcatisc.html

RSECon25 – Warwick, UK - 9th-11th September
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.The call for submissions is open now as is the JuRSE Travel Grant applications (see above). For more info: https://rsecon25.society-rse.org/

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). More info on the conference: https://us-rse.org/usrse25/participate/

Last Modified: 04.06.2025