Developer Stories

Have you ever been lead for hundreds of people? Michael Heroux has! Mike is a Senior Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, and a Scientist in Residence at St. John’s University. In this episode of RSE Stories we talk about the Exascale Computing project, working together in-person and remotely, and some good practices for you and your teams to take on during these challenging times.

Robin Wilson has an impressive body of work, from creating a new method to monitor air pollution from satellites at high spatial resolution, to writing scientific software and creating means for open data. He now is thriving doing freelance work, and has an important story to share with our RSE community. You see, Robin is in a wheelchair. It wasn’t something he expected, but it’s changed his life and given him perspective about how important it is for our community to embrace diversity and support disability. We hope that you listen to this episode, hear what Robin has to say, and take it to heart to help figure out what we can do, together, to make our world a better place.

Research Software Engineering is so much more than supercomputers and scientific programming. In this episode of RSE Stories we meet Kalina Borkiewicz, a Research Software Engineer in the Advanced Visualization lab that works on scientific visualization. We aren’t talking about plots and websites – Kalina works on award winning cinematic visualizations that are narrated by celebrities and showcased at major film festivals. Have you heard of “A Beautiful Planet” or “Seeing the Beginning of Time?” If so, you might have even seen some of her documentaries. This is an exciting episode because Kalina embodies how truly diverse the roles of research software engineers can be. For aspiring scientific visualization engineers, Kalina suggests keeping an open mind, and being curious to explore many different kinds of domains and challenges.

Changing jobs and roles isn’t easy at the best of times. But with her infectious enthusiasm Kate Court made her way from research in arts and humanities to her role as research developer at Newcastle University. Being open minded about people from different backgrounds was essential as is realising that many of our skills are transferrable. I am particularly impressed with Kate’s community spirit, which shines through in some of her projects, e.g. Story Telling for young dads in Newcastle. But also her other work with connecting mums with tech to help women either get back into work or help them navigate through an increasingly difficult and complex digital world. To get on top of all of that you have to “go in with enthusiasm” - as Kate says.

Have you ever wondered about the story of the host behind this podcast? Flipping the interview of the very first episode almost two years ago, for this week’s episode special guest host Ian Cosden interviews Vanessa Sochat, a Computer Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National lab and founder of the RSE Stories podcast. Vanessa started as a researcher in neuroinformatics, fell in love with programming, and embarked on her own journey through self-taught programming, graduate school, her first role as a Research Software Engineer in the Stanford Research Computing Center, up until where she is today. In this episode, Vanessa shares her journey, a non-traditional view about what defines “research software engineering,” and why in the world she is an avocado loving dinosaur.

For this episode I meet with Mark Abraham, who is an RSE at the EuroCC National Competence Centre Sweden. Some of our listeners may also know him in the context of Gromacs, short for GROningen MAchine for Chemical Simulations, the leading package for molecular dynamics (see their repo at gitlab). Mark started his RSE journey in Australia. He then moved to Sweden for a role at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. After a brief period at a startup at Voxo he returned to his current position at the National Competence Centre. This career progression is not unusual, as many RSEs find they need to move elsewhere to progress their careers. As Mark says, “There ought to be career structures for RSEs.” Having said that, Mark was able to build and strengthen some valuable skills during his time in the private sector.

Edd Salkield is a research software engineer in the UK, where he founded Dreaming Spires. In this episode, we talk about a different kind of future for RSE work to serve the diverse demands of digital research based on international collaboration of RSE consultants and freelancers. After finishing his studies with a MSc in computer science from Oxford University in 2020, Edd wanted to bring researchers and software engineering talent together to fulfil scientists’ needs for reproducible and trustworthy software. Only then he learned about the broader RSE community in the UK. Despite the difficulties of the pandemic, he funded the startup Dreaming Spires to bring together researchers, RSE consultants, and freelance developers to find just the right interdisciplinary skill set needed for research software projects in a scalable way. Edd and Vanessa discuss the different approaches between traditional RSE groups and Dreaming Spires’ take on research software engineering, what either approach excels at, and how they can work together. Edd shares his experiences about working in academia in contrast with working at a startup - and about tea! Learn more about Dreaming Spires on the company website at https://dreamingspires.dev/.

In this recording Frank takes us through the various stages - and challenges - that he and his RSE friends took to build the German RSE association. Like so many other RSEs, Frank Loeffler’s career began in science; physics to be precise. As such he worked in different research areas in and out of Germany. During a research assignment in the US (Louisiana State University), Frank attended the first RSE conference in Manchester, UK in 2016. This was a crucial moment. Frank met other like-minded colleagues from Germany all motivated to build a community there as well. In a period when the term “RSE” did not exist, becoming a research software engineer was a process, as Frank describes. Of course, much of this has changed in the meantime. In fact, Frank himself will be leading a team of RSEs at his university in the near future.

Daniel Nüst is a research software engineer working on the project “Opening Reproducible Research” at the Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Münster. In this episode, we talk about RSE career paths, reproducible research, and computational workflows under peer review. After finding his dream discipline of geoinformatics as a student, Daniel Nüst continued learning more about the Earth by supporting researchers with latest computer science methods as a developer and consultant at 52°North, a non-profit company for applied research with Open Source software. An RSE by tasks but not title already then, he joined the German RSE community while pursuing a PhD back at the Institute for Geoinformatics at the university of Münster. Now he is vice-chair of the German RSE association and conducts research in the areas of Open Science and computational reproducibility. You can follow Daniel on Twitter and GitHub. Shownotes If you want to learn more about the 52°North Initiative for Geospatial Open Source Software GmbH, a non-profit private research organisation and network for innovation, check out https://52north.org/about-us/profile/. For the service, Daniel created short and long reading lists around reproducibility, sorted by time available to spend. See here for details. On research software vs. career paths and recognition of RSE work, you should check out de-RSE’s first position paper An environment for sustainable research software in Germany and beyond: current state, open challenges, and call for action. For CODECHECK, check out how to Get involved as codechecker, author, reviewer, editor or stakeholder from a journal, publisher of conference.

After starting his career as an engineer, Mark went to build and head a growing team of research software engineers at Newcastle University in the UK. The transition from engineer to manager can be quite daunting. In the industry, it has been the traditional career path for many engineers, with all the problems this career change can bring. But with growing RSE teams around the globe it is a challenge that the RSE community faces as well. How do we prepare RSEs for a more hands-off-code approach and how can you grow an effective team? Mark and I touch on these questions in this latest episode of RSE Stories. Look up the RSE team on Twitter or read their blogs on Medium