Between September 5 and 7, 2023, I had the chance to participate in the seventh annual research software engineering conference hosted at Swansea University's Bay Campus, UK. My involvement included volunteering at the conference, serving on the conference committee as the co-chair of the RSE Worldwide team, and presenting a poster. This blog post aims to recount and share my experiences from this conference.

Conference Committee and Volunteering

Being a part of the Conference Committee, I was involved in the planning phase of RSECon23 from the very initial phase. For planning the conference, the Conference Committee met remotely and developed different parts of the conference. I was the co-chair of the RSE Worldwide team along with Jannetta Steyn and Angel de Vicente. After several discussions and iterations, we invited Claire Wyatt to help us design and facilitate the RSE Worldwide session.

I also had the opportunity to be an in-person volunteer at RSECon23. The volunteer team was managed by Becky Smith. All the volunteers were assigned different tasks that ensured the smooth running of the event. 

Sessions during the conference

A number of different sessions were conducted during the conference like training, workshops, unconference tracks, birds of a feather, posters, lightning talks, hackathon, walkthroughs, etc.. The keynote by Dr Gaël Varoquaux titled “Saving the world one line at a time?!” was a reflection on the successes and failures of open computational science to make a better society. Another Keynote by Daniel S. Katz was on the “State of the US-RSE”. There were several training sessions and workshops conducted during the conference. The talk “Is RSE coming of age” given by Neil Chue Hong focused on how research software engineering can be meaningful and relevant to society. The plenary panel session brought together members of the RSEng community to share their experiences of RSE work across industry, national laboratories, charity, and the public sector. This panel explored the similarities and differences between the sectors, particularly in comparison to a university setting. The underlying aim of this panel was to showcase alternative careers to the more traditional RSE roles within an RSE team or embedded within a university research group.

My poster presentation

At RSECon23, I had the opportunity to present a lightning talk and a poster titled "Shaping the Landscape: The Emerging Research Software Engineering Community in Asia." This poster highlighted the journey of RSE Asia in 2023 and my work as a Community Manager (Asia) for the Research Software Alliance.

My poster at RSECon23, Swansea, UK

RSE Worldwide session

There was a hybrid RSE Worldwide session during the RSECon23 which was organised and co-chaired by Jannetta Steyn, Angel de Vicente, and myself. This session was facilitated by Claire Wyatt. The purpose of this session was to update the RSE community about the advancement of international RSE Groups and the advancement of the recognition and importance of Research Software in different countries. This session was divided into two parts. In the first part speakers from different regions (Africa, UK, South Africa, Germany, Asia, US, Netherlands and eScience Center) provided their updates. The second part focused on international RSE community building. During this session, Lou Woodley from the CSCCE talked us through some of the fundamentals of building a community of practice, and what works and what doesn't! The agenda for this session also included the launch of a “How-to handbook on international RSE community building” (Communal note taking for the handbook). However, due to time constraints, it was not launched during this session. 

Conclusion

In summary, attending RSECon23 was a wonderful experience which provided many learning opportunities. It was enriching to learn about the developments in the RSE community from across the globe!

Group photo at RSECon23, Swansea, UK

Images by Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal

I do love RSE Conferences; this year was my fourth. But I didn’t quite expect so much to happen in such a short time as it did this year. This blog post is to serve as a story recalling the adventures of a research software engineer leading up to and attending an RSE conference and to thank all the people that made the adventure possible. Obviously, I’m the hero in my own story but I would not have been able to get anything done if it wasn’t for Colin Sauze, Ethan White, Samantha Finnigan, Frances Hutchings and Abhishek Dasgupta.

In the run up to the conference, a few things had to happen. Since I am an SSI Fellow (2022 cohort), I was still spending my Fellowship money and as part of this, I decided to build a miniHPC that can be used for training. This is an extra strand to the project in addition to the other two options, which are turning a Raspberry Pi into a server and also producing a flashdrive option that turns a laptop into a server, all to deliver Carpentries workshops without access to the Internet. With these things in mind, we the CarpentriesOffline team decided to submit abstracts to RSECon23 for a poster and a hackathon.

I never could have imagined, though, how difficult some companies make it to get educational discounts. It was impossible to get Raspberry Pi computers earlier this year, so I decided to go for Rock Pi and then made the mistake of asking for an educational discount. I had three weeks before leaving for Argentina and wanted to get as far as possible with setting up the miniHPC but, alas, it took me three weeks to get an educational discount code for a next day delivery order.

Hoping to have a working HPC if our hackathon proposal was accepted, I spent the next three weeks chasing the Rock Pi order. Not one to sit still and wait, I started getting all the Pis in my house together and built a five node HPC with 4GB Pi 4s. With the help of Sam Finnigan, we 3D printed a rack and cases for the Pi.

I was off to Buenos Aires for the Carpentries’ Executive Committee retreat at the time that the abstracts had to be submitted and had to rely on Colin to do the submissions. With the help of the rest of the team, Frances, Abhishek, Ethan and Samantha, all was done in time.

We were quite pleased when we learned that both our poster and a hackathon proposal were accepted. Over the next few months, we worked on our poster and the RPi miniHPC, which we named Pixie. I was eventually able to order the Rock Pis and all the bits that were needed for the HPC. Sam and I 3D printed some more cases, but I did not have enough time left to start installing software on it so it became one of the things on the list for the hackathon attendees to do.

A couple of weeks before the conference I realised we were supposed to deliver a two minute poster presentation. As everyone knows, things become hectic the closer you get to a conference. A two minute presentation was the last thing on my mind. Especially since I had a poster, a hackathon, and a WorldWide session to organise. I knew what had to be said, but it wasn’t until the morning of the presentation that I actually sat down, typed out what I wanted to say and checked that it would fit into two minutes. That was also when I finally decided that I was going to make it a show and tell. I mentioned it before, but Colin thought two minutes would be way too little time to include a show and tell. However, I decided to go for it and placed a Raspberry Pi and the miniHPC under the desk before the presentations started.

I was pretty nervous, but, as usual, once you start talking, things just go as they go. I pulled out the RPi, then showed the flashdrive and finally brought out the miniHPC. At the time, I couldn’t quite sense how things went because the session chair had stood up, which meant I had 30 seconds and I was focused on finishing and getting back to my chair. But once the session was over, my colleagues seemed pretty pleased and loads of people came up to ask questions. Phew!! That was Tuesday.

Wednesday started with the hackathon. We had worksheets prepared and printed (thank you Frances) as we knew what had to be done, but it was difficult to decide just how we would go about it. So, I think we pretty much played it by ear. We told people what the things were they could work on, and then they divided themselves into groups trying to work on those things. I hope participants weren’t too disappointed. At least they managed to get hands on experience with everything that can go wrong when you work with a project like this. The time we had was a bit short, but as long as their experiences made it into the documentation, their efforts will help us a great deal.

This year, I was a member of the RSE Conference committee and I was co-chair for the WorldWide session, which was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. Unfortunately, halfway through the session, I received an urgent call from a colleague whom I then had to escort to A&E where I spent the night to keep her company. Fortunately, all turned out fine and we are all okay. Except that Thursday morning I decided to do a Covid test… and guess what? No good deed goes unpunished! I tested positive.

At least I was able to watch the awards session on Zoom, and it was a great honour to learn that we received the best poster award and that I was chosen to receive the RSE Community award for Training and Education. My manager accepted the awards on my behalf, but he did a very bad job of looking like me. Note to manager: I’m short and chubby, not tall and handsome!

This brings me to the point where I have to thank everyone involved that led to me receiving these awards. I mentioned everyone involved in creating the poster, but they are also the people who have been putting a great deal of work into CarpentriesOffline. With regard to the Training and Education award, I obviously could not do this on my own. I have to thank the wonderful Carpentries and RSE communities, which include my colleagues, for their support and infectious enthusiasm. I have to thank the Software Sustainability Institute for the support and funding to work on CarpentriesOffline, and the RSE Society and its community for recognising our efforts and providing an environment where we can share our thoughts and ideas with like minded people while having fun doing our jobs.

Blog post originally published on the Archer 2 website.

RSECon23 was held this year in sunny Swansea 5th-7th September. Whilst my work at EPCC is not actually that of RSE, it is certainly RSE-adjacent; I support the work of RSEs both here in EPCC and also around the country (sometimes even around the world). My roles include ARCHER2, Cirrus and Dirac services Support Desks and EPCC Training activities, so I was pleased, iåf slightly nervous, to be invited to help represent EPCC at RSECon this year.

The Swansea University Bay Campus is literally right on the beach and we were welcomed with a Barbeque on the grass, which many of us followed up with a walk across the sands in the sunset.

Tuesday morning, and time to start work! Met up with the rest of Team EPCC and got our Sponsor Stand set up with lots of information about what we do, as well as piles of tempting freebies to hand out to the lovely folk to came to talk to us.

And then we could all get started on the Conference proper, with Dr Gaël Varoquaux delivering the Keynote “Saving the world one line at a time?!”. He outlined many of the motivations and struggles that many of us involved in software development can relate to. His talk shared inspiring thoughts on the great work that has been, and continues to be done, and how we can all contribute to the successes as well as avoiding some of the pitfalls.

The second keynote from Daniel Katz from University of Illinois Urbana Champaign outlined the growth and development of the RSE community in the USA, with many parallels to the UK but also differences due to the size and differences in the research landscapes between the countries.

After lunch, we were able to start breaking out into different Tracks aimed at various topics, followed by the Poster Lightning Talks where each of the presenters had two minutes to pique our interest in their Poster topic. EPCC were involved in two Poster contributions:

• The Scottish Medical Imaging (SMI) service presented by Susan Krueger (HIC, Dundee University)
• Natural Language Processing of Radiology Reports presented by Andrew Brooks of EPCC (a component of the operational SMI service, but developed by the research project PICTURES. )

Finally, Neil Chue Hong, Director of the Software Sustainability Institute and long-time advocate for Research Software recognition, in “Is RSE coming of age?” talked about the inception of RSE and the story of its development and growth, and suggested strategies and goals for continued improvements.

Wednesday brought more opportunities for separate Tracks of interest, and I attended the HPC Community Birds of a Feather session where we had lively discussions about the prospect of UK Exascale, benchmarking, career opportunities for RSEs in HPC, training opportunities and requirements.

After lunch, I was a helper at the “Helping Support Reproducibility in Research: An Introduction to Containers for RSEs”, giving a whistle-stop tour of containers and the opportunity to try using Singularity on ARCHER2. My support-desk skills came in handy as I was able to aid delegates getting signed up for their ARCHER2 accounts and getting logged in, up, and running.

In the evening, we enjoyed a lovely Formal Dinner with the opportunity to meet and chat with people around the table, followed by our after dinner speaker and entertainer, Steve Mould with some very nerd-appropriate edutainment, which certainly had us all in stitches.

Thursday included the Awards Ceremony and a discussion on the opportunities for RSEs beyond Universities, with interesting insights from the panel on the differences and potential benefits of working with industry, national laboratories, charity and public sector organisations.

Finally, we spit off into Tracks once more, with a further range of topics on offer.

Friday was a “Satelite event” to discuss RSE Training with presentations on lessons learned by RSEs delivering training in the past, and inspiration and recommendations on how we can improve on what is taught, and how it is taught. After lunch, there were opportunities to discuss these topics in separate groups and to share advice and best practices.

I thoroughly enjoyed my first experience of RSECon. A huge thank you to the event organisers, session chairs and participants, hosts at University of Swansea and to everyone who took the time to chat with me and all those around them. It was a hugely warm, welcoming atmosphere, a lovely part of the country to be visiting, and it was especially nice to be able to meet face to face with many, many people, some of whom I had ‘known’ by email for years but never before met.

I learned lots, but also was pleasantly surprised that I felt I also contributed. This was my first RSECon… I hope it won’t be my last.