By Daisie Huang, Software Engineer, Dryad Digital Repository.
What differentiates scientific coders from research software engineers? Scientists tend to be data-discoverers: they view data as a monolithic chunk to be examined and explore it at a fairly fine scale. Research Software Engineers (and software engineers in general) tend to figure out the goal first and then build a machine to do it well. In order for scientists to fully leverage the discoveries of their predecessors, software engineers are needed to automate and simplify the tasks that scientists already know…
By Simon Hettrick, Deputy Director.
There are more unemployed graduates in computer science than in any other discipline (see my last post). In an attempt to understand the issue, David Willetts, the Minister of State for Universities and Skills, recently held a workshop that brought together leading representatives from industry and academia, and the Software Sustainability Institute. In this post, I’ll discuss my take on some of the ideas that were discussed.
If you want good quality graduates you need to start young, so the first focus is…