This year, the German Research Software Engineers met at the KIT in Karlsruhe for their annual conference from the 25th to the 27th of February. Also the Software Engineering conference of the German Informatics Society ran in parallel with some shared sessions. I arrived late on Monday evening. I did …

I am running introductory courses to programming and digital literacy for students, both as one-off Software Carpentry workshops and, soon, part of an international master course. During the last few sessions questions of using generative AI for programming have come up. The Carpentries have started to consult the community on …

On Thursday, 30th of January 2025, the Berlin and Brandenburg regional chapter of the de-RSE society met at the DLR office in Adlershof. Stephan Druskat gave a talk on Software Citation and the HERMES project. Stephan is one of the original developers of the software citation file format which I …

The Museum for Communication Berlin currently runs the New Realities. Stories of Art, AI & Work exhibition. I went to the opening on April, 25th. The opening started with a chat with the curators Dr. Annabelle Hornung and Maren Burghard (the third curator, Stephanie Müller, could not attend the opening). The …

This year, the German Research Software Engineers met in Würzburg for their annual conference from the 5th to the 7th of March. It was quite a busy conference with 190 participants and 130 contributions. As always it was quite difficult to decide which session to attend. The first keynote by …

2023 has been a year of waiting for the German bureaucracy to get its act together. Most of it is now sorted and we have mostly moved into our new flat. I joined the Blaue Ampel, a group of photographers which I enjoy very much. Both boys have changed their …

I was choking on my coffee this morning when the news reported about a letter 26 FDP (the German liberals) politicians have written to their party leadership. In the letter they are questioning being a member of the coalition government (together with the SPD and the Greens) and suggest that …

One year has passed since I left Edinburgh to live in Germany. There were many reason why we decided to move to Berlin and not all of them had to do with the Tories and Brexit. Much has happened and it is time to take stock. I absolutely enjoy living …

On four mornings during the last two weeks of May, 2023 we ran a Software Carpentry Workshop covering the Unix Shell, Plotting and Programming with Python and the Version Control with Git lessons. This was the first in-person workshop since before the pandemic. It was also the first time for …

Unfortunately, I missed the RSE conference last year year in Newcastle because I was moving jobs and country. So, it was really nice to be able to attend this year's German RSE conference in Paderborn. Day 1 The keynote on Engineering Software Ergonomics was given by Reinhard Keil. I have …