From the 5th to the 8th of September 2022, Sylvia (writing) with Neil and Bob from the Sheffield RSE team, attended RSECon2022 a conference centred around Research Software Engineering (RSE) in Frederick Douglass Centre at Newcastle University.
RSECon2022 brought together, in Newcastle, people from around the world interested in developing software to support and facilitate scientific research. Talks and panels were wide ranging, from computational and programming methods to discussions on how the RSE community can be more inclusive. I found all the talks that I attended to be both very interesting and informative, especially the ones discussing the different experiences and kinds of work that research software engineers do.
An important thread that ran throughout the conference was ensuring good and open research through the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reproducible) which has been an important consideration in my own work and it. These themes were discussed at length, with a lot of enthusiastic community engagement in the form of questions and proposals from the audience.
The technical talks were also wide ranging and helpful, I learned a lot about new and cutting-edge software while also gaining more understanding of the software development process for small to medium teams in RSE.
“Make your code 10,000 times faster with parallel numpy” was an introduction on using tools like vectorisation and numba to significantly decrease computational times in workloads, “Quarto - a library to run them all?” showcased Quarto, a platform agnostic, multi-language system for scientific and technical publishing that can be used for making documents such as interactive and dynamic presentations with inbuilt code blocks (and running code!), rendering, and even maps. “Global.health - lessons from building a data platform during the pandemic” was a dive into the difficulties of building critical software infrastructure for governments and health agencies during the pandemic, and the fast-paced nature of writing software during rapidly changing circumstances and needs.
I’m planning to do a software and computationally focused PhD in the near future so this conference allowed me to widen my understanding of research software engineering, find out what kinds of things people do in the field and network to get to know people who may have experience of what I want to do in the future. These discussions with people from different RSE teams and backgrounds was helpful in understanding my options going forward, as well as what it is like to do a computationally focused environment and the opportunities that may come after a PhD.
I cannot overstate how useful and enjoyable the experience was and I look forward to attending more conferences and events like this in the future
