Developer Stories

Ron, a software engineer at Argonne National Lab, shares his inspiring journey from physical sciences to software engineering. He discusses the crucial roles of training and education in shaping future engineers, as well as the contrasts between wet lab and dry lab work. Ron also dives into his experiences teaching high-performance computing and the collaborative spirit of national laboratories. With a unique perspective on balancing personal goals and professional growth, his insights will resonate with aspiring engineers everywhere.

Now that research software engineering is an established role in some universities and countries it is easy to forget how difficult it was for engineers to work on research they love but really focus on the software development side rather than the academic research. In this interview Paul Richmond describes how he “masqueraded” as academic before he got the fellowship at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council - EPSRC in the UK. Since then he established himself firmly as an RSE and built a team of engineers at the university of Sheffield in the UK. His main focus has been on GPU programming, e.g. multi agent based simulation software using FLAME GPU. Since the early days, Paul has been an active member of the RSE community. And in late 2020 he was elected president of the Society for Research Software Engineering in the UK, following in the footsteps of Alys Brett.

Dan Katz is a Chief Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. But you might recoginize him from Better Scientific Software, The Software Sustainability Institute, or the Journal of Open Source Software. In this episode, we talk about software, citation and best practices, but we also talk about the community around it, and the importance of policy and people. Make sure to check out a special post, Valuing People vs. Hardware that Dan has written to supplement this episode.

Does your institution have an electronics shop? What goes on there, and is it research software engineering? In this episode, we talk with Blaise Thompson, an instrumental technologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Blaise shares with us the value of building instruments for research, and that now is the time to rethink and revamp these institutional shops to better serve the research community. Do you do work in instrumentation or are you interested in this work? Let’s start discussion and channels in our slacks!

In late 2020 Alys Brett stepped down as president of the Society of Research Software Engineering in the UK. Coming from a physics background she moved into the world of research software engineering. That transition wasn’t always easy. But Alys helped to build and shape the RSE movement right from the start. In our conversation we look back over her part in the RSE movement and also talk about what lies ahead. Alys is now leading a team of research software engineers at the UK Atomic Energy Authority working on nuclear fusion experiments.

Greg Becker is a Computer Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, where he supports both open source developers and researchers in the lab. Have you heard of spack? You might have interacted with him at a conference or on GitHub. Is he a Research Software Engineer? Does the definition of a Research Software Engineer rely on having a strong need for RSEs? How does programming relate to rock climbing? Listen to this week’s episode to find out!

Olivia Guest is a cognitive scientist and computational cognitive modeler at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at Radboud University, Netherlands. Many may also know Olivia from her popular blog post Neuroplausible. In this episode Olivia takes us through her journey to become a computational scientist. We also discuss two of her blog posts with the catchy titles of I hate Matlab and Why Women in Psychology Can’t Program. Creating a level playing field in computing for people from different backgrounds requires us to rethink the way we teach computing and build up problem solving skills. As Olivia says, “Teach them how to code.”

Happy New Year listeners! For this week’s episode, we talk to the passionate Tania Allard, previously a Developer Advocate at Microsoft, and recently announced in a new role as co-director for Quansight Labs. Congratulations Tania! But for Tania, we suspect a change in role does not change her passions for developing and leading communities, Python, and developing beautiful resources and software. In this episode of RSE Stories, we talk about the magic of open source, the importance of training, and adding a little extra spark to make our development experiences that much better.

If you work with R there is a great chance you will have met or heard of Maëlle Salmon. Maëlle is an associate editor at rOpenSci and deeply involved in community serving projects such as rWeekly and rLadies. The latter to help boost diversity. rLadies has chapters in many countries around the globe and is an active and vibrant community. In this episode Maëlle and I discuss the role R plays in the RSE community and its future. But also, her impressive catalogue of projects, including CHAI the project on Cardiovascular Health effects of Air pollution in Andhra Pradesh, India.

In our 45th episode, we talk to Rob Haines, the head of Research IT at the University of Manchester. Have you ever heard the story of how research software engineering originally came to be? Rob has a side to that story to tell, as he might be considered one of the founding fathers of the RSE movement and his group at the University of Manchester. How has his career progressed, and what are remaining challenges? Listen to this week’s episode to learn more!