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 …

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 …

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 …

The School storage is continuously increasing and datasets of many terrabytes are no longer exceptional. One of the big problems with large datasets is how to transfer them from one system to another. One of our research groups collects micro tomography datasets of the order of tens of terrabytes. These …

Here we go again, we are preparing for another round of strikes. The issues we have been fighting over have not changed: our pensions are still threatened and our working conditions have still not improved. The three day strike before Christmas was just a warm up for this round. We …

Despite of the relatively high Covid19 incidence numbers, the UK is returning to some form of normality. The year is coming to an end and the Christmas Market is absolutely packed. We are also preparing for another 3 day strike followed by further industrial action on the Four Fights and …

So you are writing scientific software and are wondering how to tell the world about it. In this blog post I briefly list the things you can do to make your software more visible. Use version control to manage your code. These days that is probably git. Depending on complexity …