Ode to the research software engineer
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Sinterklaas is a Dutch tradition featuring Saint Nicholas, who is said to arrive from Spain with his helpers and travel across rooftops to deliver small gifts and poems. Today, the Sint is visiting the eScience Center.
As days are getting colder and the nights becoming long, we make our office cozy with hot chocolate and song. The fireplace is lit albeit on the conference screen; it is an office atmosphere unlike you’ve ever seen.
We sit together ‘round the fire and wait for what’s to come, when suddenly we hear a heavy beating, like a drum. We chase towards the office entrance seeing who is there, but nothing’s to be seen except a letter near the stairs.
The letter reads “My dearest friends and fellow RSEs, please go back to your conference room and make yourself at ease. You’ve made me feel so welcome and I brought you in return a bundle of delights for you to live and love and learn.”
Curious we sat once more around the makeshift fire, stunned to find some gifts that any scientist should desire. A bag full of best practices to make your software shine, sparked with digital literacy and beautiful design.
Chocolate letters are part of the traditionTo start it off we first unpacked a gift so smart and bright:
a coffee mug for every soul who codes late in the night.
On it was a text that read “your 9 to 5 is fine,
but if you rather work at night, some caffeine’s divine”.
The next gift comes in handy for a project big or small a touch of git to help you keep your code under control. A branching scheme, a tidy diff, a history clear and clean A present many researchers admit they’ve never seen.
Then slips beneath the office door a test suite neatly wrapped, with unit tests and fixtures all meticulously mapped. “Oh generous Sint,” we all proclaim, “now bugs no more appear!” (Though secretly he knows they will, but less, and less severe.)
A handbook tied with twine he leaves, with pretty illustrations on licenses and versioning and good documentation. For knowledge lost is hard to find when months have come and gone, but with this helpful guide the happy coding can go on.
Sint conjures CI pipelines high above us in the cloud, where automated checks and builds assemble clean and proud A magical parade of green ticks marching in a row, the sweetest sight for anyone who’s watched code fail to grow.
But most of all, the Sint bestows a gift both rare and dear: the quiet craft, the steady hand, the engineer’s career. For research needs more than ideas just drifting in the air; it needs the ones who shape the tools that make discovery FAIR.
So here’s an ode to those who bridge two worlds with practiced grace: who think in algorithms yet they keep the human pace. Who build, maintain, refactor, teach, who safeguard truth with care, the research software engineers, the heroes unaware.
And as the Sint sails home again across December seas, he leaves one final message carried softly by the breeze: “Good science thrives when code is sound, transparent, shared, and clear, so honour those who make it so; support them through the year.”
This poem has been crafted in collaboration with AI-Piet*
