Developer Stories

Developer Stories

By Vanessa SochatTechnology
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Developer Stories episodes

  • The Software Engineering Challenge

    Ron is a software engineer at Argonne National Lab, and shares with us his story

    about realizing the potential for a good career by pursuing software engineering,
    and eventually finding his way from early career training to having a job at Argonne.
    Does Argonne have a representation of a research software engineer? How important are
    students and training for our future? What kind of work
    does Ron care about? You should listen to this episode to find out!

    And a special thank you to Ron, who not only was a guest on RSE Stories, but

    fully edited his own episode! This is an awesome example of the podcast being
    a team, and community effort.

    27 min
  • Working with you rather than for you

    Now that research software engineering is an established role in some universities and countries it is easy to forget how difficult it was for engineers to work on research they love but really focus on the software development side rather than the academic research. In this interview Paul Richmond describes how he “masqueraded” as academic before he got the fellowship at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council - EPSRC in the UK. Since then he established himself firmly as an RSE and built a team of engineers at the university of Sheffield in the UK.

    His main focus has been on GPU programming, e.g. multi agent based simulation software using FLAME GPU.
    Since the early days, Paul has been an active member of the RSE community. And in late 2020 he was elected president of the Society for Research Software Engineering in the UK, following in the footsteps of Alys Brett.

    30 min
  • Sustaining People

    Dan Katz is a Chief Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

    But you might recoginize him from Better Scientific Software, The Software Sustainability
    Institute, or the Journal of Open Source Software. In this episode, we talk about software,
    citation and best practices, but we also talk about the community around it, and the importance of policy and people.

    Make sure to check out a special post, Valuing People vs. Hardware that Dan has written to supplement this episode.

    44 min
  • The Shop

    Does your institution have an electronics shop? What goes on there, and is it

    research software engineering? In this episode, we talk with Blaise Thompson, an instrumental technologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Blaise shares with us the value
    of building instruments for research, and that now is the time to rethink and revamp these
    institutional shops to better serve the research community. Do you do work in instrumentation
    or are you interested in this work? Let’s start discussion and channels in our slacks!

    21 min
  • We are here for a purpose

    In late 2020 Alys Brett stepped down as president of the Society of Research Software Engineering in the UK. Coming from a physics background she moved into the world of research software engineering. That transition wasn’t always easy. But Alys helped to build and shape the RSE movement right from the start. In our conversation we look back over her part in the RSE movement and also talk about what lies ahead. Alys is now leading a team of research software engineers at the

    UK Atomic Energy Authority working on nuclear fusion experiments.

    30 min
  • For the Long Haul

    Greg Becker is a Computer Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, where

    he supports both open source developers and researchers in the lab. Have you heard
    of spack? You might have interacted with him at a conference or on GitHub. Is he a Research
    Software Engineer? Does the definition of a Research Software Engineer rely on
    having a strong need for RSEs? How does programming relate to rock climbing?
    Listen to this week’s episode to find out!

    31 min
  • Teach People How to Code

    Olivia Guest is a cognitive scientist and computational cognitive modeler at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at Radboud University, Netherlands.

    Many may also know Olivia from her popular blog post Neuroplausible. In this episode Olivia takes us through her journey to become a computational scientist. We also discuss two of her blog posts with the catchy titles of I hate Matlab and Why Women in Psychology Can’t Program. Creating a level playing field in computing for people from different backgrounds requires us to rethink the way we teach computing and build up problem solving skills. As Olivia says, “Teach them how to code.”

    24 min
  • The Purple Pythonista

    Happy New Year listeners! For this week’s episode, we talk to the passionate Tania Allard, previously a Developer Advocate at Microsoft, and recently announced in a new role

    as co-director for Quansight Labs. Congratulations Tania! But for Tania, we suspect
    a change in role does not change her passions for developing and leading communities,
    Python, and developing beautiful resources and software. In this episode of RSE Stories, we talk about
    the magic of open source, the importance of training, and adding a little extra spark to
    make our development experiences that much better.

    25 min
  • All things R

    If you work with R there is a great chance you will have met or heard of Maëlle Salmon. Maëlle is an associate editor at rOpenSci and deeply involved in community serving projects such as rWeekly and rLadies. The latter to help boost diversity. rLadies has chapters in many countries around the globe and is an active and vibrant community.

    In this episode Maëlle and I discuss the role R plays in the RSE community and its future. But also, her impressive catalogue of projects, including CHAI the project on Cardiovascular Health effects of Air pollution in Andhra Pradesh, India.

    26 min
  • Founding Fathers

    In our 45th episode, we talk to Rob Haines, the head of Research IT at the University

    of Manchester. Have you ever heard the story of how research software engineering originally came to
    be? Rob has a side to that story to tell, as he might be considered one of the founding fathers of
    the RSE movement and his group at the University of Manchester. How has his career progressed,
    and what are remaining challenges? Listen to this week’s episode to learn more!

    22 min

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