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.

An important aspect of this is to create an environment where people from all backgrounds can fully participate and contribute, ensuring that each attendee feels valued, respected and empowered to learn and grow.

Personal impressions Uwe Schmitt

This was my third time at the conference and I always appreciate and enjoy the welcoming and open atmosphere. My focus is less on the technical presentations and workshops and more on discussing and sharing experiences and challenges in my work as an RSE and, since last year, connecting with and learning from the community building experiences of many of the attendees.

My visit began with the Monday satellite event for RSE Leaders and Aspiring Leaders, which offered a series of lightning talks and engaging breakout discussions on “What makes a good leader?”.

The most important sessions for me were the two RSE Worldwide sessions with participants involved in building RSE communities from Africa, Asia, the USA, the UK, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Switzerland.

I also attended Linus and Roman’s presentation “Re-runnable Code is all you need”, which also sparked lively questions and discussion and I hope that Linus and Roman will give the presentation at one of our community calls. Due to scheduling conflicts, I was not able to attend all the sessions I was interested in, but the session I regretted missing the most was the BoF session “Project Management in Research Software - People and Processes”.

As in previous years, I benefited a lot from this one week to get away from my routine and busy schedule, to take a fresh look at my work and to get ideas and inspiration. Are you interested in joining next year? Save the date, RSECon25 is taking place on 8-10 September 2025 at the University of Warwick.

Personal impressions Roman Wixinger

To me, RSECon24 was a great opportunity to learn more about creating reproducible computing environments and share my learnings of the last few years together with Linus in a talk. Linus presented in person and I joined the conference remotely. If I had to mention three things that I liked especially about the conference and our community, then it would be collaboration, engagement and learning.

In the weeks before the presentation, people from the community supported our preparations for the talk by sharing their experiences with tools like devbox. Most prominently, Jaime Cardozo created a demo of devbox with Spring Boot that we could use in the presentation. I highly recommend checking his demo, it is the first demo I tested that worked on the first try.

After our presentation, I was overwhelmed by the number of questions and comments by people from the audience. Having people participate in the discussion and not just consume the information was great to see, especially because I did not expect to see this level of engagement.

Last, preparing the proposal for the talk and organising everything was a great learning experience to me. This was my first submission for a talk at a conference, so many things were new to me. However, this experience showed me that it is indeed possible and that there is a whole community at ETH that is here to support you in the process.

Overall, I really enjoyed the experience and would love to see more of our members at RSECon25 next year!

Personal impressions Linus Gasser

This was my second RSE-conference, again in Newcastle like in 2022. I went there together with Ahmed from my team, who is also an RSE. It was much fun gathering with other RSEs, discussing projects, hanging out, participating in the social gatherings (though I missed the Turkish Baths…), and learning new things. I just love the British architecture of the red brick houses. And running along the Ouse Burn with Mahmoud was so nice!

The highlight was of course our talk with Roman on Re-runnable code is all you need, and it went great! Even with the hybrid setting, Roman presenting from Zurich, and me in Newcastle, all was smooth and the audience was very engaged in the topic. We see now other projects using devbox and hope that this will be a small participation for making RSE projects more reproducible.

Besides that I also tried to spread the love for Matrix and had fun helping the R contributors setting up their first matrix room and linking it to their slack channel. Let’s hope others will follow :)

Thanks to Uwe for the great beer-places and Indian food…