written by Niels Drost, Mateusz Kuzak and Carlos Martinez-Ortiz

UK-RSE conference took place from the 17th to 19th of September 2019. This was my second RSE conference of the year, (the first one being de-RSE ) and nl-rse is coming up in November. The eScience Center was well represented, with Niels, Mateusz and me. With so many conferences and unavoidable travel in the times of #climateemergency we have decided to travel by train whenever possible #flyless.

Niels participated in the RSE worldwide: sharing across the borders session alongside RSE representatives from around the globe. He described the Dutch RSE landscape and important things happening such as our recently published position paper and the upcoming nl-rse conference. There was a very good response to this, with a number of people expressing interest in attending our conference.

Mateusz joined Toni Collis (Chair of Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC)), Catherina Jones and Aiman Shaikh from Science and Technology Facilities Council and James Hetherington (Turing Institute) on the panel Mentoring and Inclusivity — RSE mentoring scheme: a discussion. The group discussed different mentoring models and how to set up an RSE mentoring scheme.

One other panel discussion was around the topic very close to our hearts at the eScience Center: Policy and Culture — Software development best practices — Why aren’t we implementing them?

From the discussion it was clear that limited amount of time and lack of recognition for time spent on implementing test, good documentation etc. stand in the way. Panellists also agreed that a set of good, minimal practices are often better then overwhelming lists of best practices they are less intimidating and require less time. Best practices approach often leads to no practise at all.

This also sparked an interesting exchange on Twitter with Ian Bethune commenting:

What engineers often forget about is that docs, tests, review, etc. ==A== ctually speed up the development and pay off.

The conference was really well organised, with a great keynote by Andy Stanford-Clark, a very entertaining one by Ben Goldcare and a very inspirational post-dinner talk by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock.

Last day of the conference was filled with a variety of exciting hands-on workshops at all levels of expertise, for example: learning how to set-up your own BinderHub instance, using Kubernetes in Google Cloud, building a sustainable team culture or becoming and RSE Superhero with VS Code and Azure Pipelines.

Here are some of the take-home messages which stuck in my mind:

  • One recurring topic was that of career paths for RSEs. This was mentioned several times during the UK-RSE Trustee flash presentations, and it resonates with the same message being voiced during de-RSE and with similar discussions taking place in the Netherlands.
  • It was mentioned several times that many people feel at home at this conference. It is very inspiring to see the strong feeling of community shared amongst participants.
  • It was also mentioned that the RSE community was created as a community of giving, where participants come to share their knowledge. Again, very inspiring to see such an open culture where helping others is given so much importance.