UK RSECon'25 - Paul Rigor
I became aware of UK RSECon'25 through the JuRSE travel grant. As a programmer who spends most of my waking hours in front of a computer, traveling to a conference to present some Franken-software I've hacked sounded like a foreign idea to me. Those were my sentiments last spring. Fast-forward to September and I found myself presenting at a poster lightning talk. At that moment I reaffirmed that many experiences in life may be terrible in the imagination but are not bad and could even be surprisingly pleasant in reality.
The conference atmosphere was congenial and stimulating. One is surrounded by like-minded peers: developers and academics (not necessarily mutually exclusive) from various research fields united by a common interest in learning and sharing experiences about research software. One day before the conference I joined a Fortran workshop colocated at the conference venue. One of the host's remarks stood out to me: "The Fortran community is invisible to itself". It was energizing to meet and connect with the people involved in the small but highly active UK Fortran community.
Amanda Brock gave the opening keynote talk "The Rise of Open Source in Research". Amanda is a lawyer by trade; given that I'd expect that she could offer a comprehensive, legal definition of "open source". However, the messy reality reveals that open source is still grounded on shifting sands. As somebody who aligns with open-source principles, there are plenty of insights to be learned about the legalities of open source. I'm grateful that there are people like Amanda who work on the political forefront to preserve the open-source ethos.
I presented a poster about eCLM# —a computational software developed in IBG-3. I entertained a handful of interested people, and I found it rewarding to discuss our group's work and share some of my experiences that went into its software development. RSECon is indeed an ideal setting to showcase the development that goes behind research software.
The conference dinner was quite interesting. Attendees could choose to sit on any table labeled with a topic that was perhaps interesting to them. There were more than 10 topics; to name a few there's "board games", "movies", "Fortran", and "career development". Almost all tables were full when I arrived and thus I picked a sparsely-populated table that happened to be labeled "Explore Warwick". Note that the dinner tables were round and could seat 10-12 people. Only four people (me included) seemed to be interested in "Exploring Warwick". I had a good chat with my tablemates throughout the evening and found out that nobody is really that interested in "Exploring Warwick". After being served a nice full-course English meal, Matt Parker, who hosts the Stand-up Maths YouTube channel took the stage and gave us some laughs. He talked about crazy custom board games he made, his terrible Python coding skills, and the crowd-sourced maths breakthrough related to knot folding (we were told to be silent about it). It was the ideal way to end the first day of the conference.
On each conference day there were 5 tracks running in parallel. I attended the Geosciences track and the HPC track. Without going into much detail, it's interesting to note the similarities and the differences of the UK research groups to their German counterparts. I also attended a workshop about accessibility testing just for fun. We were asked to debug a web browser accessibility problem which I found infuriating and satisfying at the same time.
Overall RSECon'25 was super fun. I recommend it to anybody who works with research software. I'm hoping to join again next year!