Developer Stories

Today’s episode is not just a story - but an adventure! We chat with self-proclaimed “Container Tinkerer” Christian Kniep, who has gone from a small village in Germany to an industry expert in containers. In this story we hear about life hacks in the Germany army, traveling and being a teacher, making ugly websites (below), and landing some impressive roles in tech. Along the way his love for technology and appetite for adventure is easy to see, and we champion Christian for his resiliency and bravery in paving new paths. We also talk about container technologies, high performance computing, and cloud (and our own fears about all of that). We hope you enjoy this episode! Christian’s self-proclaimed “ugly website”

In this episode, I interview Informatics Honors Students from Stellenbosch University, including Megan Stock, Nina and Renee Roux, and their fearless mentor Kim Martin about their work to create organization and structure around the space of research software engineering work and roles. We don’t just talk about these strange things called ontologies, but we frame it in an ice cream metaphor, and have a lot of fun talking about programming languages, desserts, and ideas for the future. This is also a really fun episode because it is the first group interview on the podcast, and between the lines of the story is about falling in love with a new type of work, and learning more about the self. We also get to hear how Kim is tackling creating one of the first RSEng groups in Africa. We hope that you enjoy this episode - happy Februrary listeners!

Brandon Mitchell is a DevOps Solutions Architect at Boxboat (an IBM company), and can help you across the stack from shell scripting up to cloud orchestration and container security. This is an especially exciting episode because we talk about bleeding edge, and relatively uncharted territory - container security. Yes, there are companies out there working on this, but it’s not yet clear what a reproducible and secure build means for a container. Brandon has some ideas, and not only that, he is a Docker captain and an easy go to person to talk about container standards, security, and general usage. In this episode, we talk about good practices for security, reproducible builds, SBOMs, OCI artifacts, and what is up-and-coming for container security. It was a pleasure having Brandon on the show and I hope you enjoy the episode! Learn More? You can learn more about VEX, OCI, OpenSSF, or CNCF Tag Security, or help with regclient on GitHub.

We often talk about wearing many hats. But as experts in software engineering, high performance computing, or scientific domains, those hats are sometimes scoped to a particular community. We might wear a baseball hat and switch to a different team, but we won’t throw away the baseball hat entirely in favor of a top hat. To do this kind of hat trick, you need to be brave, and that is just one of the many qualities of our guest today. Chris Gorgolewski, at face value, is a Senior Product Manager at Google where he works on developer experiences. But if you dig deeper into his story, you will find entire, lucrative careers as a researcher, leader, and software engineer, and his new role as a product manager is merely one step in an interesting story on a path to have impact. In this third episode of our newly rebranded Developer Stories podcast, we follow Chris on his journey to understand the world, standardize neuroimaging, find new opportunities, and learn about himself. Chris is a lovely example of following your interests and passions, and never underestimating yourself to wear many hats.

Dr. James Cuff is the new inagural Executive Director of the MIT Office of Research Computing and Data (ORCD), and he brings a rich history of leadership in the high performance computing that he’s excited to share! How does one pursue this path? There is a lot of stumbling, making mistakes, radical candor, and learning about yourself and people. In this episode, James shares his story, starting from across the pond, and ultimately ending up in an area that he loves, Boston, to be an HPC cowboy for the next generation of scientific computing!

In tech, we all can tell a horror story. It’s when you accidentally ran a command, didn’t back something up (and lost it), or scream had your Zoom audio on when you were singing to Avril Lavigne (anyone else?) So this week, and for the first inagual episode of the newly rebranded “Developer Stories” we are sharing some of these horror stories in this Halloween special episode! Happy Halloween listeners! 🐈‍⬛💀🎃👻🥘🪦👿☠️

For this episode of RSE Stories we are joined by Fernanda Foertter, Director at Voltron Data and experienced HPC practitioner. You may know her on Twitter as @hpcprogrammer, or for her significant contributions at earlier roles at Nvidia or Oak Ridge National Lab, but have you heard her origin story, and how she got involved in this work? In this episode, we travel with Fernanda through her early work, discovering her love and saavy for computers, and following her interests. We talk about her journey through national labs, tech companies, and now at Voltron Data where her adventure continues.

Last time in the SC22 Mini-series, we learned about the Early Career Program (ECP) from its chair, Marina Kraeva. Today we get a first-hand glimpse into what the program can offer its attendees as we talk to six previous ECP participants. Our six guests in this episode are Sameh Abdulah, Jean Luca Bez, Silvina Caino-Lores, Hang Liu, Valeria Barra, and Bashir Mohammed. In a mix of one-on-one and panel interviews, these past attendees tell us how ECP taught them valuable professional lessons from funding to time management to mentor-mentee relationship building, as well as created lasting connections and a sense of community with a network of both their peers and more senior scientists and researchers. All participants encourage any professionals in their early career to apply for the program this year, taking place in Dallas, TX, as part of Supercomputing 2022. To apply, visit the Early Career Program page. As a bonus, two of our interviewees also spoke to Marina Kraeva for an SC22 blog post! Check it out on the SC22 Blog Posts Page.

Ana Trisovic is a Research Associate at Harvard School of Public Health and a Sloan Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Effectively, she does data engineering for her research group and works on reproducible data and software dissemination. First, Ana speaks of her background, from her first job at Microsoft Development Center Serbia, to CERN, UChicago, and Harvard. She shares what inspired her to pursue projects relating to open-source software, open data, and open science. Her work focuses on big data workflows and research reproducibility, and she shares her experiences working with particle physics experimental data, geospatial and climate data, and sensitive medical data. As a member of Consortium of Scientific Software Registries and Repositories (SciCodes), she contributes to research data and software sharing and preservation efforts. Her study shows that research software and code scripts are frequently shared with data, and she is working on better supporting those in the Dataverse data repository. We discuss data engineering roles in the broader RSE scope and recognize them as undervalued yet critical for research groups working on secondary data analysis. Ana speaks of the joys and challenges of working with diverse datasets and the value of open-source software, reusable data workflows, and adequate documentation. She shares recommendations for publishing research data with software and emphasizes the role of data repositories. We end the conversion with community engagement topic ideas.

Marina Kraeva is a Senior Research Computing Systems Analyst at Iowa State University and this year’s Early Career Program Subcommittee Chair. In this episode, Marina tells us about the history of the Early Career Program (ECP) at Supercomputing, the overarching goals of ECP, and what potential participants can expect to learn this year! She encourages all professionals in their early career to apply for the program this year, taking place in Dallas, TX, as part of Supercomputing 2022. To apply, go to the Early Career Program page and click “Application Details.”