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Newsletter December 2024

Dear all,

It’s been a year since we organised the first Zoom call on 12 December 2024 with Prof Simon Hettrick presenting the history and current statue of the Research Software Engineering community in the UK.

This newsletter is intended to look back at the previous year and to share our ideas and plans for 2025.

What happened in 2024?

  • We have organised 8 events in 2024, some on Zoom, a few more in person, all dedicated to different topics hoping to cover the breadth of RSE related topics and interests.

  • We have meanwhile 320 subscribers on our mailing list, and regular posts on our Matrix Chat. The website https://rse.ethz.ch counted almost 4000 unique visitor between April and November.

  • EPFL started community activities in May 2024, you can find more details and a list of past events at rse.epfl.ch.

  • We got some funding from enhanceR.ch and from the ETH-ORD programme to continue building RSE communities in all ETH domain institutions (EPFL, EAWAG, EMPA, PSI, WSL and ETHZ) and to promote the FAIR principles for research software.

  • One of our personal highlights was the “RSE Jobs” panel discussion which also resulted in a blog post written by community members to share their notes for everyone who could no participate in the event.

  • We presented our activities at the German RSE Conference in March 2024 and the UK conference in September 2024.

Looking forward to 2025

This is what we are discussing and planning for the next year right now:

  • A git workshop for beginners and intermediate users in February.

  • Zoom presentations in January and later during the year.

  • A hackathon in collaboration with ord-hackthon.ch during the year. This is still in the early planning phase and we hope that we can organize this before summer.

  • We are organizing RSE information events at the RSE domain and other Swiss academic institutions within the RSE4ORD. project. The first such event will take place 3 February at WSL in Birmensdorf. For details see here

Impressions

Personal Impressions from Jaime Cardozo (ETH Library)

The collaboration with Linus Gasser and Roman Wixinger began naturally within the RSE community, when I found out they were preparing a presentation on isolated development shells. I recognized a similar use case in my own team, where managing various programming languages and frameworks made switching between code bases a daunting task that I wanted to simplify.

By reading various materials and discussing these ideas with them, I was able to gain a much deeper understanding of the subject. In return, I was able to provide them with some feedback in advance of their talk at the RSE conference in Newcastle.

Introducing new tooling can increase the mental load on team members, so I’m cautious and take the time to thoroughly understand the underlying issues before adopting any solutions. Inspired by their findings, I created a simple demo project as a proof of concept, which is now available publicly for others to explore and learn from.

Isolated environments can help eliminate dependency conflicts and unpredictable setups, ultimately enhancing both productivity and maintainability. As a result, I’m now happily starting to roll out Devbox gradually to our repositories, ensuring my team can enjoy a smoother development experience.

So far, it’s been a great start, and I’m eager to see how future collaborations within the research software engineering community will bring us forward!

A few pictures

RSE Conference UK 2024
First Meetup February 2024

Get involved

Join us and become a member of the RSE community!

Feel free to forward this newsletter to your colleagues or other interested parties.

Acknowledgments

We want to thank our partners and supporters, including ETH Media and all the volunteers who contributed their time and expertise. Our activities during the last year would not have been possible without the continued help of RSEs from many other countries.

We hope you enjoy the holiday season and are looking forward to seeing you in the new year!

Best wishes,

Franziska, Jaime, Roman, Tarun and Uwe