On Thursday 14th of August, the Imperial College London Research Software Engineering community hosted the third session of the “Research Software Conversation Series: Tools and techniques for modern research in different domains” titled "Research Software Documentation". This meetup explored the importance of documentation in research software, the challenges faced in writing it, and the best practices to follow.
Last Tuesday 17th of June, the Imperial College London Research Software Engineering community hosted a session of the “Research Software Conversation Series: Tools and techniques for modern research in different domains”. This event explored how research software is used for hardware control and automation, and specially the challenges and lessons learnt when doing so.
Several members of Imperial's central RSE team recently attended the Collaborations Workshop 2025 (CW25) online and in-person at the University of Stirling, UK. The Collaborations Workshop is the annual flagship event of the Software Sustainability Institute, which brings together delegates to explore best practices and the future of research software. The official theme for CW25 was “Future-proofing research software: evolving together as a diverse community”.
Alongside keynote talks, the event included lightning talks, workshops, and sessions dedicated to collective idea generation. The last day of the event was dedicated to a collaborative hacking session, where participants were encouraged to get together and work on software projects.
In this blog post, we share our experiences of attending CW25.
Hacktoberfest is a month-long annual event that encourages people to contribute to open source throughout October. The motivation of Hacktoberfest is to celebrate all things open source, especially the people that make open source so special.
This year the central RSE team at Imperial planned two in-person events during Hacktoberfest on the 1st and the 23rd of October. The events were open to anybody interested in participating in open source software, either coding or with non-code contributions. Everybody was welcome to join the events and bring their own code along for a discussion with the central RSE team members. This included low code and non-code contributions - a big chunk of what surrounds good open source software has nothing to do with code!
It's now a little over 12 years since the term "Research Software Engineering" (RSE) was first coined at an event held in Oxford, UK. Seeing around 400 people gather at the Frederick Douglass Centre at Newcastle University for this year's RSE Conference – RSECon24 – was proof of the amazing growth that we've seen within the community and the wide range of opportunities that now exist to undertake software development work within the research domain. We know that career opportunities within the research technical professionals space are also expanding rapidly but there's still a way to go in recognising and rewarding the people who contribute vital technical skills to support and undertake research. This year's conference offered a wide range of talks, workshops and Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions, alongside a great opportunity to network with other RSEs and researchers and catch up with friends both old and new. This growth of the community, opportunities for the future and how we can help to support and grow careers, as well as making our community more diverse and inclusive, were some of the topics covered at this year's conference. Several members of the Imperial College London Research Computing Service were in attendance at the conference, as were other RSEs and researchers from departments across the institution. In this blog post, we talk about our experiences, highlights and key takeaways from this year's conference.
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.
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.