Code for Thought

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 - until 6 October 2025.

Links:

• https://www.software.ac.uk/programmes/fellowship-programme the fellowship programme's website. Please, go to this page if you think about applying!
• https://mdsimpson42.github.io/converse/ Mike's ConveRSE page on mental health
• https://book.the-turing-way.org The Turing Way Handbook
• https://obsproject.com The tool to create videos
• https://github.com/DeepLabCut/DeepLabCut DeepLabCut app 
• https://github.com/talmolab/sleap The SLEAP app

And here are the fellows

• https://www.software.ac.uk/fellowship-programme/esther-plomp Esther Plomp
• https://www.software.ac.uk/fellowship-programme/mike-simpson Mike Simpson
• https://www.software.ac.uk/fellowship-programme/niko-sirmpilatze Niko Sirmpilatze

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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://atlas.cern/about an overview of the ATLAS experiment 
• https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/33100-christian-gutschow Chris' profile at UCL
• https://opendata.atlas.cern/docs/documentation/monte_carlo/introduction_MC Monte Carlo simulations at ATLAS
• https://home.cern/science/computing/grid the LHC computing grid
• https://www.hepdata.net the repository of High Energy Physics (HEP) experimental data
• https://atlaspo.cern.ch/public/ATLASOrganisation/index.html

Some publications with Chris as author or contributor:

• https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.7610 some rare Standard Model processes
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02793 dark matter signatures
• https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.00950 Monte-Carlo modelling (theoretical physics)
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.13154 GPU acceleration/common file format for HPC
• https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.05451 project RIVET to preserve data, see also
  • https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15984
• https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4809-efficient-histogramming-for-high-performance-computing-in-c-with-yoda/ efficient histogramming - a presentation at FOSDEM 25

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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.io/2025-09-09-workshop/ list of the forthcoming workshops Sept/Oct 

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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 "leech barometer"
• https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/approach/modelling-systems/unified-model the Unified Model for weather and climate modelling 
• https://github.com/cylc/cylc-flow the workflow engine, mentioned a few times in the episode
• https://github.com/MetOffice/stc other open source tools 
• https://niwa.co.nz/climate-and-weather/niwa-weather one of the collaborators of the MetOffice
• https://www.ywt.org.uk/oil-tanker-collision the oil tanker collision from March 2025 we talked about in the episode

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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.psych.mpg.de/2931418/deutsch_pm_jonas_hagenberg_comic.pdf  Ein Poster zum Thema Depression und Mikroben
• https://www.psych.mpg.de Das Max Planck Institut für Psychiatrie in München
• https://pure.mpg.de/pubman/faces/ViewItemOverviewPage.jsp?itemId=item_3428878_1 der Code Klub am Institut

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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 human choreography in computing. 

Curious? Have a listen

Links:

• https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/research/  the link to all the talks at the Open Research devroom at FOSDEM25
• https://research-fosdem.github.io/2025-online-schedule there was an "unofficial" devroom online on 15 Feb, 2 weeks later
• Interested in joining the effort on semantic climate? Here's the speaker's email: [email protected] 
• https://codeforthought.buzzsprout.com/1326658/episodes/13216530-en-open-data-open-software-with-teresa-gomez-diaz Previous episode with Teresa Gomez-Diaz (Uni Paris Gustav Eiffel)

Announcements:

• https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdV75CnxOjw4Xd7AYad8ChZir1OPnW8ex7yUsOCldqRDzdUaQ/viewform Survey from Maxence in Karlsruhe/Germany
  • https://www.fiz-karlsruhe.de/en/bereiche/lebenslauf-und-publikationen-maxence-azzouz-thuderoz Maxence profile
• https://github-pages.arc.ucl.ac.uk/Education/rseworkshop/ UCL workshop 23 - 27 July (in person)

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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 GitHub project
• https://www.astropy.org AstroPy a popular lib in Astrophysics 
• https://numfocus.org Numfocus in the US, which supports a number of open source projects

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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 mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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
• https://www.haskell.org Pandoc is written in Haskell
• https://joss.readthedocs.io/en/latest/paper.html JOSS and Pandoc
• https://johnmacfarlane.net/tools all the tools from John MacFarlane
• https://github.com/tarleb Albert's GitHub

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:[email protected]
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie 
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/  (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/