Blog
Results of the RSE logo community vote
We closed the poll on 8 April and are pleased to announce the winner: We got a grand total of 104 submissions, and we’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who took part. This was much more than we expected! We’re also very grateful to everyone who took the time to give us more detailed feedback, we are already working on incorporating some of your suggestions to finalise the logo.
April 10, 2025
First RSE community event at WSL Birmensdorf
With financial support from the Open Research Data (ORD) Program of the ETH Domain , we have also started to establish an RSE community at WSL, and link it with the communities already available at other institutions such as ETHZ, EPFL or EMPA. On February 3rd, 2025, more than 40 people attended the first RSE@WSL in-person meetup at WSL Birmensdorf. The event started with several guest presentations from Empa and ETH Zurich.
March 26, 2025
Community Voting: Logo Ideas
We are working on a Swiss wide RSE community website. We have a couple of logo ideas and we would like your input to decide which idea we should develop further. You can find the ideas in our survey. Please submit your preferences by Tuesday, April 8.
March 25, 2025
Call for presentations
Do you want to share your work, make an announcement or present something that you think will benefit the RSE community? We are looking for presenters for upcoming events! You can submit presentations from 5 minutes to 45 minutes, either on-site or via Zoom, using this form. We will contact you after submission. This is not a call for a specific event, but we would like to collect presentations for possible future events.
March 20, 2025
Call for funding RSE Ambassadors
Dear all, we are pleased to announce that the EnhanceR association offers funding for RSE ambassadors from academic/research institutions for one year: Institutions which are members of the EnhanceR association with 10,000 CHF, Institutions which are not EnhanceR members with 5,000 CHF. RSE Ambassadors advocate for and support the Research Software Engineer (RSE) community. They play a crucial role in raising awareness about the importance of research software engineers in academia and research institutions.
February 21, 2025
Community voting results for the domain name of a Swiss-wide RSE website
The results are in, and the winner (🥁🥁🥁🥁) is rse.swiss! Together with EnhancerR we will now apply for the domain name rse.swiss. The process is a bit complicated (see here) and and if our application does not go through, we would proceed with the second place winner rse-ch.org. We got 79 responses in total, the average rankings for the offered options are (lower is better): Domain name Average Ranking rse.swiss 2.2 rse-ch.org 2.43 swiss-rse.org 2.52 ch-rse.org 2.85 Some people have asked why we have not offered rse.ch as an (obvious) option. The simple answer is, that this domain name is not available and the current owner did not show any interest in selling the name.
February 20, 2025
Applying for RSE jobs: Panel discussion
This blog entry is a collaborative effort by members of the audience to consolidate their personal notes and impressions from the event on 15 October 2024 at ETH Zurich. For more details about the event, including a full list of panellists, please visit the more detailed event page .
October 26, 2024
"Hacking4Sciences" course from MTEC
Do any of the following statements sound familiar to you or someone you know? I have a non-computer science background. I want to incorporate programming into my approach to working with data. I want to be part of the open source ecosystem. If so, the lecture “Hacking for Sciences – An Applied Guide to Programming with Data” by Dr. Matthias Bannert from the Swiss Economic Institute (KOF) at MTEC-ETH might be the right fit for you.
September 19, 2024
"Basics of Computing Environments for Scientists" course from ISG DPHYS
Do any of the following statements sound familiar to you or someone you know? I have taken a Python course but am having problems with the setup or the correct way to install packages. I want to know how to use my computer’s command line efficiently. I’m interested in Python tools, e.g. for checking Python code. I’m not sure which editor or development environment to use for Python development. I’m interested in best practices to increase my productivity when working with Python. The lecture “Basics of Computing Environments for Scientists” from the IT Support group of the ETH Physics department covers these and many other topics that are often missing in many programming courses.
September 13, 2024
RSECon24 - The RSE Community conference 2024
The UK conference for the research software engineering community, RSECon24, was held in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 3-5 September. The yearly conference is organised and run by a team of volunteers from the Society for Research Software Engineering RSESoc and is offered as a hybrid conference with 400 attendees onsite and around 80 online this year. The organisers aim to provide a relevant, inclusive and engaging conference experience for the RSE community, with a balanced and varied programme that caters for all roles and skill levels, celebrating achievements and showcasing impactful software in research.
September 12, 2024
Code Review Day on 28th of August
Dear RSE members, Have you ever had the feeling that you need way too much time to understand what your code does? Then I am happy to announce the next code review day on Wednesday 28th of August at the HIT building. We’ll be looking at your code and help you to improve it. Common topics so far were: writing unit and functional tests, a simple way to improve your code what data structures to use for which problem and many more Write me an email if you want to participate, marco.gaehler@gmx.ch. Most topics are also explained in my book available at https://github.com/gaehlerm/SoftwareEngineering and let me know if you have some feedback on my book.
July 27, 2024
RSE book club
Hi everyone, I’m Marco and would like to organise a book club for the RSE community. The idea is to meet every two weeks to discuss a chapter from my book about Software Engineering.
June 4, 2024
Schedule Meetup on 4th of June 2024
We published the detailed schedule for the next meetup in our events section.
May 19, 2024
Schedule Meetup on 24th of April 2024
We published the detailed schedule for the next meetup in our events section.
April 16, 2024
Resume of 2nd RSE@ETHZ event
Our RSE community continues to grow and evolve. The recent establishment of working groups and a series of lightning talks highlighted the diverse interests and expertise within our ranks.
March 27, 2024
We need your help: Call for contributions to working groups!
Based on the group discussions at the first meeting in February, we decided to initiate working groups.
March 26, 2024
New Matrix space for RSE activities in Switzerland
Together with our colleagues from EPFL we decided to create a new Matrix space #rse-ch:matrix.org to host all current and future RSE activities within Switzerland. The rooms from the previous space still exist, but are now also registered within the new space.
March 20, 2024
The website is ready for community contributions!
We migrated the previous version of the website (which was a bunch of HTML files + some CSS) to HUGO for managing and rendering the content from Markdown to HTML. The new setup allows integration of community contributions, such as blog posts using merge requests.
March 17, 2024