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 …

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 …

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 …

We all make mistakes. But they are quite often invisible. Especially when we are programming. Once we know that we have made a mistake we tend to fix it and move on to the next problem. Mistakes are a learning opportunity. Sharing them thus helps others. The Software Sustainability Institute …

I was asked to install the parallel ice sheet model (PISM) by one of our researches. PISM is modern high-order physics ice sheet model that is written in C++ and uses MPI and PETSc. All our Linux machines are LCFG managed Scientific Linux 7 machines. PISM is built from source …

I went to an excellent panel discussion on AI biases, failures and fairness hosted by the University of Edinburgh. This presentations and the following discussion was very interesting, although I think it didn't quite hit the spot I was looking for. A lot of the discussion was on biases. Biases …

Day 1 The conference started with a keynote by Andy Stanford-Clark, IBM UK Chief Technology Officer, on IoT, AI and Quantum Computing. The talk was very much fun. Although I must say I am still not convinced by IoT and I am somewhat worried by AI. The issue of needing …