Code for Thought

Meet 6 of the research software champions at Imperial College London (UK) who help to create better research - through better software: Alan Xavier, Lukas Kopecky, Jakub Lala, Benjamin Scharpf, Sara Patti and Sneha Jha.  Links https://www.imperial.ac.uk/computational-methods/rse/call-for-rs-champions-2024/ The call for the 2024 champion scheme cohort https://imperialcollegelondon.github.io/rs-comm...

[EN] English Edition: "Green computing" had a strong showing at the annual conference for Research Software Engineering in Newcastle, UK, early September 2024. I talk to the presenters, poster creator and organisers of the birds of the feather session on the subject. In addition you hear from Charlotte Pascoe and Poppy Townsend from the UKRI on their project to get us to net zero. And fi...

Deutsche Ausgabe : in der ersten DE Ausgabe nach der Sommerpause geht es gleich um 2 Open Source Projekte: MTEX und PyRolL. Mit von der Partie sind die Entwickler und Autoren der Softwarepakete Ralf Hielscher (MTEX) und Christoph Renzing (PyRolL), beide von der TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Sachsen. Links: https://mtex-toolbox.github.io MTEX  https://tu-freiberg.de/en/node/2702/prof-dr-rer-nat-ralf-hi...

ENGLISH EDITION: There are a lot of "large" things at CERN, including the amount of data produced and the software needed to manage and analyse them. In this episode I talk to Laura Promberger and Jakob Blomer from the CERN virtual machine/file system VM/VMFS project about how this set of tools is helping researchers.  And not just physicists, as CERN VM/VMFS is also used in other areas...

L'édition française: Ça y est - le premier épisode de Code for Thought en français.  Comment reproduire et évaluer l'apprentissage automatique? Publier les résultats de recherche avec les données et le code source? Avec Pascal Monasse, chercheur chez IMAGINE (Laboratoire d'informatique Gaspard Monge) et éditeur de journal IPOL - Image Processing On Line.  Animé par: Ghislain Vaillan...

ENGLISH EDITION : Beyond Open Research is a project at Imperial College London (UK), that tries to change research culture more open and transparent. I met with Dr Hamid Khan, who was leading the project and Prof Julie McCann, Vice-Dean for the Faculty of Engineering to find out more about exactly how they want to go "beyond" open research.  A few links https://www.imperial.ac.uk/researc...

ENGLISH EDITION : Welcome back to Season 8 of Code for Thought. Just before we dive into the new season, this trailer will tell you what lies ahead between September and December 2024. Get in touch Thank 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 @...

In May 2024, I attended a workshop/training course on Software Management Plans (SMP), held at the University Gustave Eiffel east of Paris, France. In this episode I talk to the organisers and participants about why SMPs might be useful and under what circumstances.  Teresa Gomez-Diaz, Geneviève Romier, (2018). Research Software Management Plan template. PRESOFT project: Preservation for REsearch...

My guest for this episode is Dr AJ Lauer. AJ has been working hard to make the HPC workplace a more open and welcoming environment. She was inclusivity chair at SC21 in St Louis, US and worked with other groups such as Women in HPC. Lately, in 2023, she created her organisation 'Thriving Ibis' to work with senior managers and leaders in the field.  https://www.thrivingibis.com Thriving I...

The Digital Research Academy - DRA - was created in 2023 to meet the increasing demand for training in open science and research. In this episode I talk to the two founders, Heidi Seibold and Joyce Kao, as well as members like Yeganeh Khazaei (Yegi) and Danny Garside.  https://digital-research.academy the home page of the DRA https://digital-research.academy/train-the-trainer/ Train the Trainer pr...

In the second part episode on the Turing Way, I meet with contributors like Patricia Herterich and Sarah Gibson - who were part of the original team - as well as Malvika Sharan and Anne Steele who joined later. Through these conversations I hope to show how the Turing Way transitioned from being an online guide for reproducibility and open science to a thriving community with members across the gl...

CERN, the European Nuclear Research Centre, is celebrating its 70th birthday in 2024 and I want to give you a glimpse of the kind of work that happens there. Meet Spyridon Trigazis, who will take us through CERN's infrastructure and how they use OpenStack and Kubernetes to "keep the lights" on.  https://home.cern/ CERN homepage  https://www.openstack.org OpenStack https://kubernetes...

In this last ByteSized RSE episode of this season, we talk about an important subject for Python engineers: Packaging. With my guests Liam Pattinson from York University (UK) and Laszlo Sranger from Hypergolic, we go through the standard Python tools as well as  package managers such as Poetry. Links: https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/ Python packaging guide https://pypi.org The PyPI Index ht...

In dieser letzten Folge vor den Sommerferien treffe ich mich mit Dr Iris Ehlert und Dr Hendryk Bockelmann, um mit ihnen über ihre Arbeit am natESM (nationale Erdmodellierungs Systeme) zu sprechen.  Hier ein paar Links https://www.nat-esm.de/ Home page vom natESM https://www.nat-esm.de/services/support-through-sprints Der Sprintprozess beim natESM Projekt https://www.dkrz.de/de das Deutsche Klimare...

The International Conference of Supercomputing, ISC, met in Hamburg (Germany) between 12-16 May 2024. For the first time, a workshop on Research Software Engineering was held there. And I talk to some of the organisers, Stefanie Reuter and Matt Archer and presenters, Eleanor Broadway and Samantha Wittke, how it all went.  https://www.rse-hpc.org/program/ The program for the workshop https://www.is...

What a fun day that was: the National Research Software Day in Hilversum on 23 April 2024. It was organised by the eScience Center in the Netherlands and in the course of this episode you will hear from one of the organisers, Lieke, a keynote speaker - Jenny Bryan, members of a panel discussions on research infrastructure. But also from 4 artists - because the organisers added an art exhibition to...

In this session of ByteSized RSE we talk about the FAIR principles and research software. My guest helping me with that is Jamie Quinn, currently RSE at Imperial College London. Here are a few links: https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201618 The article on FAIR https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01710-x The article on FAIR research software https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/st...

The Turing Way was created 5 years ago and during the Collaborations Workshop 2024 at the University of Warwick, UK, we had a big birthday party to celebrate the occasion. In this episode, part 1 of 2 episodes on The Turing Way, I sit down with the founder of The Turing Way, Dr Kirstie Whitaker, who is also the Programme Director for Tools, Practices and Systems at the Turing Institute in the UK. ...

Bastian Greshake Tzovaras arbeitet am Alan Turing Institute in London zum Thema Citizen Science, also Bürgerwissenschaften. Und dies ist auch das Thema unseres Gesprächs, denn Bastian arbeitet daran schon seit geraumer Zeit. Und er zeigt uns wie Wissenschaft durchaus von einer engeren Zusammenarbeit mit Bürgern profitieren kann. Links https://tzovar.as/ Bastian's Homepage https://scholar.soci...

In part two of this "mini-series" on diverse roles in data science teams, I speak with Dr Emma Karoune from the Alan Turing Institute https://www.turing.ac.uk/   and the deputy director of the Software Sustainability Institute of the UK, Simon Hettrick. Emma and I explore the skills and policy landscape of modern data science roles. Emma is one of the awardees of the Skills Policy Award...

The Collaborations Workshop, run by the Software Sustainability Institute https://www.software.ac.uk/ is a long-running institution. I had the pleasure of going there in May 2024 for the first time. It was an exciting, but also exhausting, couple of days. The 3 themes focused on AI/ML in science, environmental sustainability and citizen science. Here is a report on the workshop with a bunch of int...

My guest in this episode is Greg Wilson, who co-founded the Carpentries in 1998 together with Brent Gorda. Since then, the Carpentries have gone global teaching essential computing and data skills and training the next generation of teachers.  Greg stepped down from the Carpentries a while ago, but he still feels passionate about their mission and goals. Links: https://carpentries.org/ The Home pa...

In dieser Folge geht es um die Frage, wie man Software in wissenschaftlichen Artikeln zitieren kann. Die Antwort: das Citation File Format (CFF) - an dem mein Gast Stephan Druskat maßgeblich mitgewirkt hat. Stephan und ich hatten uns auf der letzten UK RSE Konferenz in Swansea in einer der Pausen zu einem Schwätzchen getroffen. Inzwischen wird das CFF von etlichen Organisationen wie z. B. GitHub,...

Property based testing can help you make your tests more effective and your code more robust. Together with my guests Duncan McGregor and Nicholas del Grosso we talk about what property based testing is and in particular go into one widely used implementation for Python - the Hypothesis library.  Here are a few links: https://increment.com/testing/in-praise-of-property-based-testing/ from David Ma...

In this episode I talk about two different aspects of diversity in tech and in research software engineering in particular. First we hear from Jeremy Cohen, who has been running the DiveRSE seminar series since 2022 and is the co-author on a paper on the subject (link below). Then I talk to Michael McLeod, who is telling us about the role LGBTQ+ people play in tech.  Links https://diverse-rse.gith...