Celebrating its fifth year, the RSLondonSouthEast workshop returned to Imperial College London's South Kensington campus. Imperial's RSE team was well represented, with the event drawing RSEs and academics from across London and the South East of England. This year's conference was co-chaired by Jeremy Cohen, from Imperial, and Ilektra Christidi from UCL.
The central RSE team at Imperial recently attended the PyData London 2024, the 10th Anniversary edition. It was an in-person event that brought together data scientists, data engineers, and developers from around the world. This event served as a platform for sharing ideas and learning from one another. In this blog post, we share our highlights from the event, showcasing why it's essential for anyone involved in data science to stay updated and connected with the global community.
With Artificial Intelligence, in particular Large Language Models (LLMs) being a significant topic in the wider world, it was naturally a very significant topic that was seen across the whole conference. Most talks involved some kind of data processing or Machine Learning workflow. Scratching beneath the surface, we found some additional highlights.
In the Imperial RSE Team we make extensive use of continuous integration (CI) with GitHub Actions. We use CI to ensure our projects build and are correct across a range of scenarios (OS, python version, dependency version, etc.). Widely accepted wisdom is that it is best practice to catch issues early via frequent and thorough CI rather than to catch them later. This must however be set against the monetary and environment cost of running unnecessary compute workloads on every push to GitHub. In particular, the pricing structure of GitHub Actions means workloads run on Windows and MacOS are more costly (certainly financially and presumably environmentally). This is particularly the case for private repositories for which Imperial has a fixed budget of minutes.
On Friday, April 26th, 2024, the central Research Software Engineering (RSE) team at Imperial College London hosted the R Dev Day at the Seminar and Learning Centre on the South Kensington Campus. This event, proposed by Dr. Heather Turner, aimed to foster collaboration among both new and experienced contributors interested in contributing to base R. I had the pleasure of co-organising this event alongside Dr. Turner and Dr. Diego Alonso Alvarez.
I recently received a new MacBook Pro for work. Great! The only catch is that Apple discontinued their Intel-based line of MacBook Pros in 2021 and their new line of laptops use the Apple silicon M-series coprocessors. This might not seem like a problem at first, but the Apple silicon processors use ARM-architecture instead of Intel's x86 architecture. For Python development, this is a potential problem because not all Python packages are installable for ARM architectures.
This year, the annual conference organised by the Society of Research Software Engineering was back on as an in-person event for the first time since 2019. This meant that for many of the college’s central RSE team it was their first opportunity to meet up with RSEs from across the country and further afield. The College was well represented, with five delegates attending from the central team along with RSEs based in specific departments, research groups and teaching staff from the Graduate School.
Read the full blog post in Dan Davies's Blog.
The RSE team is involved in an increasing number of software projects requiring a front-end web app. The main advantage to having a web app element for your research software is that users can interact with it via a web browser, without having to install anything to their local machine. There are of course downsides, including the need to deploy, host and maintain software somewhere suitable. However, there is a wide range of popular frameworks to make the whole process a lot smoother.