Code for Thought

English Version: our journey this week takes us to Southampton University - the Digital Humanities group, led by James Baker, my guest. And there is a lot more to the digital in Digital Humanities than software. James takes us through a tour through the exciting work that happens there: Links: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/research/institutes-centres/digital-humanities https://www.southampton.ac.u...

English Edition: WHAM, BOOM, CLAC, WHOOSH - sound can represent many things, so why not experimental data? James Trayford and Chris Harrison want to show that you can, with their project called Audio Universe. And we're going to hear some of the sound samples during my conversation with them. Links: https://www.audiouniverse.org the project's home page https://github.com/james-trayford/s...

édition française : On sait, que les centres de calcul consomment beaucoup d'énergie. Pour déterminer combien, on peut utiliser l'outils logiciels comme Kwollect et Alumet. Simon Delamare (Kwollect) et Guillaume Raffin (Alumet) nous expliquent comment Kwollect et Alumet fonctionnent.  https://gitlab.inria.fr/grid5000/kwollect https://www.grid5000.fr/w/Monitoring_Using_Kwollect https://al...

Connecting instruments and managing data transfer between machines is bread and butter stuff for scientists. But you don't want to do the same thing each time you get a new machine or change to another one. Which is why my guest Sébastien Weber from Toulouse, France, created PyMoDAQ, an Open Source Python tool to help you with automating all of that.  Links: https://pymodaq.cnrs.fr/en/latest/...

Job interviews and coding tests are daunting. But most of us have to go through them at least once in our lives. Like Mike Mroczka, my guest, who is a software engineer. To share his experiences and help others he wrote a book how to get on top of coding interviews: " Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview ". I met with Mike to discuss how interviewing and testing coding skills have change...

For this week's episode I met with (some of) the core developers behind Quarto, an open source tool for scientific publishing: Carlos Scheidegger, Gordon Woodhull and Christophe Dervieux. Listen to our chat and find out more what Quarto is, how it works and what's in store for the future.  Links https://quarto.org https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli https://github.com/typst/typst ht...

Deutsche Ausgabe:  mein Gast diese Woche ist Eric Upschulte vom  FZJ  (Forschungszentrum Jülich) der mit seiner Software CellDetection den Preis für die Software des Monats April 2025 ausgezeichnet wurde (neben anderen Preisen). Was genau CellDetection macht, und das man es auch für total andere Gebiete verwenden kann, erfahrt Ihr in dieser Folge. Links: https://github.com/FZJ-INM1-BDA/celldetecti...

This year's RSE (research software engineering) workshop at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Hamburg, Germany, focused on one theme: continuous benchmarking for high performance computing. Organisers Rene Caspart and Robert Speck tell us how it all went, while keynote speakers Michele Mesiti and Jayesh Badwaik give us concrete examples of how they go about continuous bench...

English Edition: Meet Phil Reed from the University of Manchester and SSI fellow. In my chat with Phil we touch on a number of themes, like how to boost digital skills for people outside the research software domain, like librarians. And look out for Phil's other endeavours (hint: towards the end of the episode). Links: https://www.software.ac.uk/fellowship-programme/phil-reed Phil's SSI...

English Edition:  My guest Bill Kurth and I will go on a space exploration of a special kind: the Voyager probes. Launched in 1977 just a few weeks apart they have now reached interstellar space. Some of the data they send back to Earth are audio - which can tell us a lot about the outer planets like Jupiter or indeed interstellar space, where both Voyagers are now.  Links https://science.nasa.gov...

Edition française: Guillaume Levrier est chercheur associé à la Bibliothèque nationale de France - Francois Mitterand. Il est l'auteur d'une application Open Source appelée Pandorae. Une application pour simplifier, normaliser et explorer les documents ou données numériques.  Bonne écoute https://github.com/Guillaume-Levrier/PANDORAE Pandorae sur GitHub https://politique.science https://...

My guest this week, Rémi Delaporte-Mathurin from MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts/US, will tell us about the first Open Source Software in Fusion Energy (OSSFE) conference from earlier 2025 - but also why it is important to use and develop open source software in the field and the difficulties he met during his career.  Links: https://ossfe.github.io/OSSFE_2025/ The conference website https://ossfe.g...

Better Software - Better Research! This is the mission of the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) since 2010. To support this, the SSI has been running a fellowship programme. In this episode you'll hear from 3 different fellows from the 2025 cohort about their motivation and plans for their fellowship. Maybe you want to join, too? You can apply for next year's fellowship - 2026 - un...

Meet Christian Gutschow, particle physicist and research software engineer at UCL (University College London, UK). Christian is one of the scientists working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN. And together we try to give you a glimpse of what is going on in this massive experiment that tries to unlock the secrets of matter. Software plays a crucial part in this - and at all levels.  Links: https://a...

The Code Refinery has been training researchers on how to write better software since 2016. In this episode Samantha Wittke, Richard Darst and Radovan Bast tell us how it all started, how CodeRefinery is run and what's in store for the future. Do look out for their workshops for September and October 2025. Links: https://coderefinery.org/ The CodeRefinery home page https://coderefinery.github...

Welcome to Season 10 of Code for Thought. To warm us up for the forthcoming winter and autumn season, here a list of the episodes and content you can look forward to.  The season will start in earnest on 2 September.  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 (ukr...

English edition: In the last episode of this season of Code for Thought, I want to take you on a tour through the MetOffice in Exeter, UK. My host Dimitri Theodorakis and some colleagues of his talk us through some of the exciting work happening there.  Links: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research overview of research at the MetOffice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_prognosticator the "...

Deutsche Ausgabe:  Vera Karlsbauer und Jonas Hagenberg arbeiten am Max-Planck Institut für Psychiatrie in München. Aber Software und Datenverarbeitung spielt auch dort eine große Rolle. Vera und Jonas erzählen uns etwas über ihre Arbeit und über den Code Klub den sie gegründet haben um anderen Forschenden und Studierenden den Zugang und Umgang mit Software etwas zu erleichtern. Links: https://www....

FOSDEM is the annual event for all things free and open source software in Europe happening over the 1st weekend in February in Brussels. In this episode I want to talk about one "dev room" (developer room) in particular: the one on Open Research, that has been running since 2020.  Over the course of a day, we heard from a variety of speakers on topics ranging from climate change to huma...

Parallel programming is hard. Say Hi to Parsl a Python library and tool that aims to make the task a bit easier. I spoke with two of the key people on the project, Dan Katz and Ben Clifford. https://github.com/parsl/parsl the GitHub repo of Parsl https://funcx.org FuncX  http://montage.ipac.caltech.edu Montage programme mentioned in the discussion https://github.com/Caltech-IPAC/Montage it's...

Meine Gäste Carina Haupt und Christoph Steinkamp vom DLR beschäftigen sich mit der Frage, inwieweit der Einsatz von Large Language Models (wie z. B. ChatGPT) bei Forschungsprojekten und deren Softwareentwicklung helfen? Große Versprechungen - aber kleine Brötchen? Get in touch Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email m...

John MacFarlane and Albert Krewinkel from Pandoc take us through the history and development of this very popular Swiss-army knife for digital documents and document publishing. Pandoc is, of course, open source. And if you want to contribute, don't be shy! https://github.com/jgm/pandoc GitHub repo https://www.lua.org Lua language https://pandoc.org/lua-filters.html Lua filters and Pandoc htt...

Brad Frost is the author of a book called Atomic Design, in which he tries to help UI/UX designers improve their workflow and approach and create digital apps. We also talk about the changing roles of designers and design in a world where we get new gadgets all the time. As Brad says in his book: let's go atomic Links: https://bradfrost.com Brad's home page https://atomicdesign.bradfrost...

Dr Elisabeth Lobe und Dr Peter Schuhmacher vom DLR geben uns einen (nicht ganz so) kleinen Einblick in die Welt von Quantencomputern und an welchen Themen sie daran arbeiten. Ein spannendes Gebiet auf dem viel passiert! Hier eine Reihe von Links https://qci.dlr.de/en/alqu/ Die Quanteninitiative und die daran beteiligten Projekte https://qci.dlr.de/en/quantum-computing-basic-knowledge-in-five-video...

My guest is John Stevenson from the British Geological Survey (BGS) and there is a lot to cover in this episode: John's switch from science to engineering; how to move from proprietary to open source software - and the hot stuff: volcanos. And what John did in volcanology.  Here are a few links: https://www.bgs.ac.uk/people/stevenson-john/ John's profile at the BGS  https://volcanologist...