Code for Thought

This year's annual conference on Research Software Engineering (see link below) is upon us at the moment. And this year, SeptembRSE is running online only. On this occasion, Code for Thought is throwing some light on some of the sponsors of the SeptembRSE, without whom none of this would happen. In the first of these extra episode I have the pleasure of talking to Richard Pitts, Alison Derbenwick Miller and Kevin Jorissen. Alison, Kevin and Richard are at Oracle for Research and they talk us through the work they do and how this links to research software engineering.SeptembRSE: https://septembrse.github.io/#/timetable/all    Oracle for Research: https://www.oracle.com/oracle-for-research/   Oracle Blog posts: https://blogs.oracle.com/documents Open Nebula: https://opennebula.io Get in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Welcome back to Season 2 of Code for Thought!Reproducibility is hard and no one knows this better than Heidi Seibold. In this episode Heidi and I talk about the new reproducibility network she helped building in Germany and the many challenges we all face when trying to reproduce scientific output and papers.Find the German reproducibility network onhttps://reproducibilitynetwork.deOr find them on Twitterhttps://twitter.com/germanreproGet in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Have you thought about turning your PhD and research into a business? You are not alone. It can be a daunting task. But there is help at hand in form of support programmes and organisations. Of course, not all of them will end up being successful. But as I hope you will hear in this episode you may want to give it a try because, after all, nothing ventured, nothing gained. In the first part of this episode I'll be talking to a team of researchers, Ben, Haaroon and Alhamza about why they created a startup and the challenges they face. For the second part, we'll be hearing from Riam Kanso - CEO of ConceptionX. ConceptionX is a programme designed to aid researchers turn into venture scientists. Finally:It's the beginning of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere and I'll be taking a break. Season 2 of Code for Thought will start again on 6 September.Links- https://conceptionx.org - https://raphtory.github.ioGet in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

This episode is about mobile apps in research software engineering. Not surprisingly, there is an increasing demand for mobile apps by researchers. In this SORSE event from February 2021 I am talking to Adrian Harwood, Patricia Barnby and Mark Turner how their teams at the University of Manchester and the University of Newcastle deal with this.We also talk about a subject that will sound very familiar to engineers developing mobile apps: native iOS, Android development or cross platform solutions such as React Native or Xamarin. - The RSE Team at Uni. Manchester, UK https://www.itservices.manchester.ac.uk/research/-  The RSE Team at Uni. Newcastle, UK https://rse.ncldata.dev   - SORSE events 2020/2021 https://sorse.github.io  - Developing mobile apps with Xamarin https://dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/xamarin  - Developing mobile apps with ReactNative https://reactnative.dev  And of course native Android and iOS development:- Android https://developer.android.com  - iOS https://developer.apple.com  Get in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Whereas the last episode focused on architecture at enterprise scale, this episode is looking at architecture for software solutions. I was fortunate enough to meet with 3 solutions architects from Amazon Web Services in the US: Akash Gheewala, Ro Mullier and John Majarwitz.As we discuss in this episode, the path to become an architect varies: whether it is moving into the role straight away or gradually after years in software engineering. Architecture can be an attractive  choice for engineers who want to develop their career but don't want to leave the technical field. However, as you move into the role of architect you will need to develop more than technical skills, be that business acumen or stakeholder management. Research software engineering is a relatively young discipline. But it is rapidly expanding and I think there is an opportunity for us to learn from our colleagues in the private sector: whether it is for developing career paths or software solutions for complex engineering tasks.Get in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Architecture at large scale, such as in enterprises and organisations with complex infrastructure, puts very different demands on the role than being a software engineer or even solutions architect. For sure, you will need solid technical skills. But the ability to convince and drive solutions become more and more important. In this episode I talk to three ex-colleagues of mine from Elsevier - who have been working as enterprise architects for some time. And we touch on the challenges of the role and how they deal with it.Links you may want to follow up on:- Lean Software Architecture http://www.leansoftwarearchitecture.com- Melvin Conway's paper: "How do committees invent?" http://www.melconway.com/Home/Committees_Paper.html- Conway's Law: http://www.melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.htmlGet in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

This is the first part on software architecture. Meet James Smithies from Kings College in London (UK), Steve Crouch from the Software Sustainability Institute/Southampton (UK) and Keith Gutfreund from Elsevier, Boston (USA).Together we explore, what architecture means in software development, both in the private sector and in research; how - and if - architecture fits in with research software engineering.Links:- Digital Lab, King's College London https://kdl.kcl.ac.uk     - Software Sustainability Institute https://www.software.ac.uk  - Martin Fowler's take on architecture https://martinfowler.com/architecture/ - Is architecture overrated? https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-architecture-is-overrated/ Get in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

In this episode we continue our journey into the Julia programming language and dive a little deeper into some aspects of Julia. For that reason I met with 2 engineers: Jarvis Frost from Imperial College and Lyndon White from InveniaLabs. Both wrote a lot of Julia code and we discuss some of the projects they have worked on.The projects in question:Jarvis' project example: Polaron Mobility-  https://github.com/jarvist/PolaronMobility.jl    Differentiation with Julia - https://github.com/JuliaDiff   - https://discourse.julialang.org/t/state-of-automatic-differentiation-in-julia/43083Lyndon's project: NamedDims - https://github.com/invenia/NamedDims.jl  Named Tensor post (mentioned in episode) by Alexander Rush http://nlp.seas.harvard.edu/NamedTensor  Other links you might find interestingComposing code with Julia https://www.oxinabox.net/2020/02/09/whycompositionaljulia.html Multiple Dispatch comparison https://medium.com/swlh/how-julia-uses-multiple-dispatch-to-beat-python-8fab888bb4d8Flux Julia package https://fluxml.ai/Flux.jl/stable/ Linear Algebra/Julia https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/stdlib/LinearAlgebra/Get in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

In 2009 a group of engineers Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral Shah and Alan Edelman set out to develop a new language that is open source, easy to use but also highly performant. They called this language "Julia" and it appeared ca 2012. Since then the community of Julia developers has grown year on year, with some exciting projects happening at e.g. Nasa but also commercial products.In this first part of episodes on Julia I want to get a flavour of the Julia language, what it is used for and how the community of developers is developing. I am talking to Logan Kilpatrick (Community Manager of Julia) and then with Mayeul d'Avazac and Mose Giordano, both practitioners and contributors.  Here are a few links you might be interested in:https://julialang.org the main go site for the Julia programming language. If you want to learn Julia, go to https://julialang.org/learning/https://julialang.org/blog/2012/02/why-we-created-julia/ the Blog post explaining why Juliahttps://www.youtube.com/c/TheJuliaLanguage/videos there is a great set of videos on Julia on YouTube https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia checkout the repo and see what's currently going on with Juliahttps://discourse.julialang.org/t/tiobe-index-rank-23-as-of-jan-2021/42730/5 how does Julia fare in the world of computing. Look at the rankinghttps://juliacomputing.com/blog/2021/01/newsletter-january/ Julia adoptionGet in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The Nordic RSE network held a 3 day workshop in December 2020 and I was delighted to record a panel discussion on the subject of 'Research Software Engineering careers and their position in academia'.Despite the fact that some countries established roles for research software engineers (e.g. the UK, US and France), in many places aspiring RSEs face obstacles and hurdles to turn their passion into a career. Samantha Wittke from Aalto University in Finland chaired the discussion. Interesting links:Declaration of Research Assessment (DORA) https://sfdora.orgNordic RSE organisation https://nordic-rse.orgSome of them universities participants were joining fromhttps://www.ntnu.no (Home to Digital Lab, Norway)https://www.helsinki.fi/en (University of Helsinki, Finland)https://www.kth.se (Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)https://www.aalto.fi/fi (Aalto University, Finland)https://www.imperial.ac.uk/admin-services/ict/self-service/research-support/rcs/research-software-engineering/ (RSEs at Imperial College, London, UK)Get in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/