UK RSECon'25 - Davis Thomas Daniel
RSEcon25 in Coventry was my first Research Software Engineering (RSE) conference, and it proved to be an excellent introduction to the community. I was impressed by the range of talks, walkthroughs, and discussions that catered to participants with diverse expertise and backgrounds.
On the first day of RSEcon 25, I found the talks both inspiring and practical. The plenary talk by Amanda Brock, highlighted the impact of open-source in empowering digital infrastructure and explained what it really means to be free and open-source. I also found the talk on making software outlive your job particularly relevant, offering practical strategies to ensure projects remain sustainable despite changes in personnel or funding. Since I mostly write code in Python, walkthrough sessions on using uv and pixi for managing python dependencies by James Thomas (University of Bristol) was particularly informative for me and provided with a great starting point for generating reproducible python environments. Another walkthrough I particularly enjoyed focused on automated CI/CD. While I was already somewhat familiar with the basics, the session went deeper into advanced workflows, which I found especially valuable. I also valued the session on pre-commit, a tool that was new to me, and I’ve since been able to successfully implement it in my own projects.
Among the sessions I attended on the second day, the workshop on Accessibility Testing for RSEs stood out to me the most. It was highly engaging and practical, demonstrating how subtle design choices can create barriers for users, and giving me hands-on experience in identifying and addressing accessibility issues. I learned about simple browser extensions such as WAVE which aid in finding accessibility issues in websites and correcting them. I was also delighted to apply what I learned by improving the documentation website that I maintain, using the tools and ideas shared during the session.
The session on training local large language models (LLM) on own documents on the third day was also particularly useful which included a walkthrough on retrieval augmented generation with LLM which can also be run on systems with low computational power. Other sessions on the same day which dealt with high performance computing topics such as building and deploying software on HPC systems were also interesting.
I also enjoyed other organizational aspects of the conference including the location, in-campus accommodation at the University of Warwick, themed tables for dinners, distributed socials and the essential focus on inclusivity. Interaction between sponsors and participants was further encouraged through an interesting game of getting a stamp from each sponsor you have discussion with. RSEcon’s buddy scheme through which new members in the community are introduced to the concept of RSE is also a great initiative which I made use of.
Overall, the event was well-organized, highly informative, and left me motivated to adopt RSE best practices in my own projects. I feel fortunate that I was given the opportunity to attend the conference and glad that I could attend. Looking forward, I hope to maintain contact with other RSEs I met during the conference and contribute back to the RSE community in the future meetings.