Mark Woodbridge

Using the Cloud for Research Software Engineering

By Mark Woodbridge, Research Software Engineering Team Lead, Imperial College London We previously described three RSE-related use cases for Microsoft’s Azure platform, ranging in deployment granularity from VMs to individual JavaScript functions. In this post we’ll explain further how we use those and other Azure services to complement our on-premise infrastructure – helping us to deliver our RSE projects faster.

Senior RSE vacancy at Imperial College London

Imperial College London are recruiting a Senior RSE to join the Research Computing Service.

Cloud-first: Serverless alerts for trending repositories

By Mark Woodbridge, Research Software Engineering Team Lead at Imperial College. In our previous two posts we described two ways of deploying web applications to Azure: firstly using a Virtual Machine in place of an on-premise server, and then using the App Service to run a Docker container. The former provides a means of provisioning an arbitrary machine much more rapidly that would traditionally be possible, and the latter gives us a seamless route from development to production – greatly reducing the burden of long-term maintenance and monitoring.

Cloud-first: Rapid webapp deployment using containers

By Mark Woodbridge, Research Software Engineer group lead at Imperial College London.

This is the second in a series of posts describing activities funded by our RSE Cloud Computing Award. We are exploring the use of selected Microsoft Azure services to accelerate the delivery of RSE projects via a cloud-first approach.

Cloud-first: Simple automated testing using Drone

By Mark Woodbridge, Research Software Engineering Team Lead

Why research software engineers should have permanent contracts

By Caroline Jay, University of Manchester, Albert Solernou, University of Leeds, and Mark Woodbridge, Imperial College London

Ten reasons to be a research software engineer

Anthony Finkelstein wrote a great post about the benefits of being a software engineer: you can call yourself an engineer without getting your hands dirty, and you can wear jeans and a T-shirt to work (if you feel like being smart). All good points, but it got us thinking, whilst it may be good to be a software engineer, it's even better to be a research software engineer. And here's why.

The invaluable contribution of open-source software to research

By Mark Woodbridge, software developer, Bioinformatics Support Service, Imperial College London.

This is the first article in a new series called a day in the software life. In this series, we will be asking researchers from all disciplines to discuss the tools that make their research possible.

I'm a research software engineer developing tools to help life scientists organise, analyse and share their data. This is a varied and…

"An opportunity to learn a huge amount in a very short time"

By Mark Woodbridge, Bioinformatics Support Service, Imperial College London.

This year will mark my tenth anniversary as a software developer, most of which I have spent in academia. I started out developing a web application in Java using Eclipse on Linux. This much hasn’t changed, despite the rise of Android, NoSQL, HTML5, DVCS and many other technologies and tools. Neither have the basic principles of software architecture, testing, and usability. So I’m lucky that I was encouraged to pick up good habits at the start of my career.

But there have been other invariants…

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