JuRSE

deRSE Conference 2025 - Karlsruhe

February saw the JuRSE team and a group of FZJers head to the annual conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany and this year it was hosted at the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) in Karlsruhe. It was a packed programme as per previous years with five parallel tracks filled with talks, workshops, birds of a feather sessions and a poster session.

The JuRSE travel grant awardees have all reported back on their experiences and for some of them it was the first time at a conference for Research Software Engineering.

Their full individual summaries are linked below but overall, they commented on the welcoming atmosphere, the great discussions had across disciplines, were amazed by the diversity of topics, got stuck in with the networking, learnt about FAIR principles for research software, the RSE training and education programmes, realised that there is a lot of work still to do around career development and recognition of those who create research software.

They appreciated the opportunity to present in talks and in the poster session and you can read about their experiences and their submissions below.

There were many contributions by FZJ and our JuRSE team had three submissions in the programme, two posters and a demo. Lupe provided a demo of her project which is currently in its early development phase. The 'RSE Scavenger Hunt' encourages people to get hands-on practice for some research software engineering skills and suggests exercises that build on community tutorials and lessons. The idea is that while people learn they collect tokens with the goal of collecting as many as possible. Keep an eye out for more on this soon!

Our team is also working on a supporting workflow around CLAs. The second contribution showed our efforts to bring a tool like the 'cla-assistant' or 'cla-bot' that are available on github to gitlab. A first version is available as CI/CD Component on Jugit , get in touch via Jugit to start testing it.

And our third contribution was a poster about the JuRSE Community at FZJ and the activities and initiatives that we are providing here. It proved very useful, starting discussions on the importance of scientific community building. We met other community builders from other institutions and had fruitful discussions with them.

Have you been inspired to attend an RSE Conference yourself and take advantage of a JuRSE Travel Grant?
Head to the travel grant page to see if any calls are currently open!