Imperial College Research Software Community Newsletter - January 2020

Hello! We’re back with a slightly shorter (slimmer?) version of the newsletter for the start of 2020. A belated Happy New Year to everyone in the RS Community. The last couple of months may have been quiet but there’s plenty to look forward to in the world of research software…

• Dates for your diary
• RSE Bytes
  • News
  • Blog posts
  • Tools and resources
• Some reminders…
• Get in Touch, Get Involved!

Dates for your diary

Some (very) imminent deadlines:

• Friday 31st January: Deadline for proposals for mini-workshops and demo sessions at the Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaborations Workshop 2020 (CW20). CW20 will take place from Tuesday 31st March to Thursday 2nd April in Belfast and registrations themselves have just opened.
• Friday 31st January: Deadline for submissions for the annual UKRI Cloud Workshop, which returns to the Francis Crick Institute on Tuesday 3 March. Registration for attendees is also open.
• Tuesday 4th February: Applications close for the second cycle of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Essential Open Source Software for Science grants. The College’s RSE team are on hand to assist with proposals.

And a few upcoming events:

• Thursday 30th January: Bioinformatics London’s January meetup is Efficient #Rstats Workflows with the {drake} and {orderly} packages, featuring Rich FitzJohn of Reside-IC
• Wednesday 5th February: The importance and challenges of sharing research software is is jointly organised by Open Research London and RSLondon and features speakers from The Software Sustainability Institute (SSI), Sage, The Alan Turing Institute and UCL.
• Thursday 6th February: RSLondonSouthEast 2020, the annual workshop for RSEs in or around London is back for a second year at the Royal Society. This is your last chance to register - the schedule has been announced and it’s full of interesting talks.

RSE Bytes

News

• Congratulations to Diego Alonso Álvarez of the RSE team on being awarded an SSI Fellowship. Diego follows previous Imperial recipients Ed Smith and Lucy Whalley. As a result of his award he’ll be running a series of nationwide workshops on building user interfaces for scientific software during 2020. Watch this space for more information!
• RSECon2020 will take place from the 8th - 10th September at the University of Birmingham.

Blog posts

We have a bumper series of recent blog posts to highlight this month. Three from Imperial:

• The latest post from the RSE team is a deep-dive into the support provided by Julia for extensibility and parallelism by Mayeul d’Avezec
• The Reside-IC team’s blog features two new posts:
  • Alex Hill’s most used keyboard shortcuts
  • Rich FitzJohn’s adventures in fixing warnings from CRAN

And three from the broader RSE community:

• Two posts from the US RSE community’s “RSE Stories”:
  • Rebecca Sutton Koeser of Princeton on Hidden Layers of Data
  • Ben Glick of Lewis and Clark College on HPC and Samoan Fire Knife Dancing(!)
• Parallel programming in Python (Part 1) from Johan Hidding and Pablo Rodríguez-Sánchez at the Netherlands eScience Center

Tools and resources

• scalene is a high-performance, high-precision CPU and memory profiler for Python
• ProPlot is a comprehensive, easy-to-use matplotlib wrapper for making beautiful, publication-quality graphics
• nbdev allows you to fully develop a Python library in Jupyter Notebooks, putting all your code, tests and documentation in one place
• makecite generates latex + bibtex citation commands by looking at what packages are imported in your Python code
• Roam is a “note-taking tool for networked thought” (not open source, but applicable to research and subject to some glowing reviews!)

Some reminders…

The Research Software Community is run by a committee of 8 volunteers. We’re always looking for new committee members to help bring new ideas, organise events, edit our newsletters and generally help in making the community work for its members. If you’d like to get involved, or you have any questions, contact Jeremy Cohen.

A new Slack workspace is available for members of the RS Community and RSEs based at nearby institutions. It was set up following discussions at December’s Winter Seminars event and you can join via this link.

The Research Computing Service continues to run a weekly clinic for all matters related to research computing. Bring along your HPC or programming problem or just come to talk to the RSE team about your (or their!) work. See the schedule for dates and locations of upcoming clinics.

Did you know that you can record software as a research output in Symplectic? The RSE team have prepared a how-to guide.

The RSE team are also running two new Research Computing courses for the Graduate School: Essential Software Engineering for Researchers and Using Git to Code, Collaborate and Share. Places are available now.

If you’re developing open source research software at Imperial then please consider submitting it to the Research Software Directory by either opening a pull request or dropping a line to Mark Woodbridge (m.woodbridge@imperial.ac.uk).

Get in Touch, Get Involved!

That’s all for this month. Thanks to everyone who suggested links for this edition.

Drop us a line with anything you’d like included in the newsletter, ideas about how it could be improved… or even offer to guest-edit a future edition! rse-committee@imperial.ac.uk.

If you’re reading this on the web and would like to receive the next newsletter directly to your inbox then please subscribe to our RSE Community Mailing List here.

This issue of the Research Software Community Newsletter was edited by Mark Woodbridge. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.