RSE.swiss - The Swiss RSE community – Blog

Open-source software services meet-up: special edition 'Fragilités et souveraineté numérique'

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On the 4th March 2026 the Center for Digital Trust (C4DT) organised a special edition of our twice-yearly open-source software services meet-up with an external guest speaker, David Monniaux from CNRS / Université Grenoble Alpes.

David’s presentation “Fragilités numériques” on the fragility of our digital ecosystem was followed up with a panel discussion on how this relates to digital sovereignty, in our society at large and in academia and at EPFL in particular.

The panel was included David and the following people from EPFL:

Khadidja Malleck, operational director of the Research Computing Platform (RCP)
Prof. Mathias Payer, leader of the HexHive lab
Rafael Corvalán, director of the Domain of Information Systems (DSI)

Imad Aad from C4DT moderated the session, and included many questions from the public.

Panel discussion on digital fragility and sovereignty

The room was packed with 37 people from EPFL, and we counted 17 remote attendees who also participated with questions. After the meeting, many discussions followed between the participants and the panelists.

Attendees engaged in discussion after the presentation

Reducing our fragility in the digital space by increasing our sovereignty is a subject which will keep us busy for the coming years!

We are looking forward to the Autumn edition to continue working toward more open-source services at Swiss universities to strengthen digital sovereignty in research and education!

EPFL RSE Lightning Talks

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Another wonderful RSE Lightning Talks at EPFL with 20 participants, including 3 joining us remotely via Zoom. Thanks to all the presenters for taking the time to prepare and share their work. The interactive group discussion led by Carine Dengler about using LLMs in coding tasks rounded off the event. We wrapped up the event with pizza and networking.

Talks and slides

Linus Gasser (EPFL): The Promptware Kill Chain
Diego Antolinos Basso (UniNe): Data without data
Carine Dengler (EPFL): Interactive group discussion on using LLMs in coding tasks

Mmh - Pizza!

International 2026 RSE survey is now live!

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The 🌐 international 2026 #RSE survey https://softwaresaved.limequery.com/611257 is now live, and for the first time, #Switzerland 🇨🇭is participating!

You don’t need to be called a research software engineer to complete the survey. Your formal job title is irrelevant – if you write code for academic research as part of your work, we want to hear from you!

The survey collects a considerable amount of detail about your role, the type of work you do, your working practices, job satisfaction, and demographics. This means it will take around 20 minutes to complete – we appreciate that this is a significant amount of time to ask for, and we thank you for it!

The international RSE survey is a joint effort of the Software Sustainability Institute and national RSE associations and communities. The survey closes on 20 March 2026.

https://softwaresaved.limequery.com/611257

The call for proposals for FAIR competence funding is now open

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The new call for proposals for FAIR Competence Funding is now open. You can find the call and all related documents here.

Please note that the FAIR Competence Funding scheme is being launched as part of the ETH FAIR Coalition project. This institution-wide initiative, led by Annette Oxenius, Vice President for Research, and Ueli Weidmann, Vice President for Infrastructure and Sustainability, aims to further implement the FAIR principles at ETH Zurich.

At the New Year Town Hall Meeting, Annette Oxenius will invited all ETH researchers and members of staff to sign the FAIR Coalition Charter. The Charter sets out a shared commitment to the FAIR principles and defines core values and decision-making processes. We hope that many ETH researchers and staff members will decide to support the FAIR principles and sign the Charter.

We are delighted to give you the opportunity to sign before the official announcement and to be among the first signatories. You are most welcome to read about what signing the Charter involves, and then sign it. You can do so here.

We look forward to collaborating with you further on FAIR and related issues.

Best wishes,

Ignaz

Preannouncement: ETH Zurich FAIR Competence Funding

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Are you an ETH member who handles research data and code as part of your work? Would you like to help implement the FAIR principles at ETH Zurich? Do you have ideas on how to share your expertise and services with a wider community of ETH researchers?

ETH Zurich is testing a new funding scheme as part of a broader initiative to implement the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) for digital research assets such as code, data, notes, metadata and images. These FAIR Competence Funding Grants will be up to 50k CHF for a maximum of 18 months to support the further training of RDM specialists and the expansion of the RDM services they provide.

Who it is for: Research Software Engineers (RSEs), Data Stewards, Digital Curators/Archivists, Technical Personnel, and all Researchers with Research Data Management (RDM) responsibilities.

To submit a proposal: To apply you must demonstrate proven RDM skills, be an ETH employee, and have the support of at least two research units.

Register now: Information and answers to questions will be provided at an online event on 26 January 2026 from 13:00 to 14:00. Register here for the event and to receive the application documents by email on the day of publication.

RSE Newsletter #1 - 2025Q4

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Dear all,

Welcome to the first issue of the Swiss Research Software Engineering Community Newsletter. We are delighted to introduce the new national network, look back at recent activities, share developments from across Switzerland and abroad, and give you an idea of what is coming next. This edition brings together updates from initiatives that are actively shaping the future of a Swiss RSE community.

Picture from EnhanceR 2025 symposium titled 'Swiss RSE in action' in Fribourg. Information about the Symposium .

Updates from Switzerland

Building the community

The foundation of a national community has been a major focus this year. RSE ambassadors supported by the RSE4ORD project and EnhanceR are helping institutions develop local activities and create new points of connection. A community building event with more than 20 people organised by EnhanceR in Bern in June brought practitioners together from many disciplines, providing space for exchange and collaboration.

Outreach

Our new website is now online at rse.swiss, offering a home for Swiss RSE activity.

The websites content and setup is hosted at https://gitlab.com/rse-switzerland/rse-swiss that welcomes contributions, and the community’s visual identity has taken shape with a new logo.

The first stickers are already appearing at events and are thriving on the backs of laptops across the country.

Working groups at RSE EPFL

Several working groups have formed to explore priorities for the RSE community. The Sustainable IT group is outlining practical approaches to reduce environmental impact in research computing. The Career Paths group is examining how institutions can recognize and support RSE roles. Another group is focusing on the importance of permanent contracts to improve RSEs’ job stability in academia. All groups are open to new contributors who would like to be involved. You can join us on the RSE-EPFL channel.

Past events

This year has been full of activity. The EnhanceR symposium gathered more than 100 participants from institutions throughout Switzerland. Half of them were attending an EnhanceR event for the first time, which highlights growing interest in RSE topics. Local kick off events also took place at WSL, PSI, the University of Bern, and the University of Zurich. These meetings helped connect researchers across disciplines and encouraged the launch of local RSE groups.

RSE Survey

As part of the RSE4ORD project, we launched the Swiss RSE Survey, and have received 191 responses to date.

We are planning to publish a detailed analysis of these responses in early 2026. If you have experience in such analyses and would like to help, please reach out to us.

Here are two teaser figures: The first one shows that many of the respondents to the survey are RSEs with a strong research focus, and none of those who responded think of themselves as doing 100% engineering.

As you would expect, the RSEs in the middle of the spectrum are the most convinced that they are actual RSEs!

The second one is what the RSEs would like for 2026 – please excuse Claude for contextualising this in a Western festive setting. Also, some of these entries are already active, so the gifts are unwrapped and in use!

Updates from around the world

Conferences

Sister initiatives have been active internationally: deRSE25 and RSECon25 created opportunities to follow global developments in RSE and to share Swiss contributions with a broader audience.

Funding and resources

The Software Sustainability Institute had their first round of sustainability funds that support work aimed at strengthening software maintenance practices Research Software Maintenance Fund.

The funded projects can be found here.

Additional global updates

The Research Software Engineers International network is expanding rapidly, with Swiss RSE now part of this growing community.

Outlook 2026

The coming months bring many opportunities. The deRSE26 and RSECon26 conferences will offer fresh perspectives and new collaborations. A new international RSE survey is planned and will shed light on global trends in research software engineering.

The RSE4ORD project will conclude at the end of 2026 with a final Swiss RSE Day, likely to take place in September at ETH Zurich. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with you and developing a strong national community. Stay tuned!

If you would like to share news, contribute updates or support future editions of this newsletter, please get in touch at Matrix/RSE-General. We are excited to begin this journey with you and grateful for the enthusiasm already present across our institutions!

Warm regards,

Son Pham-Ba, Linus Gasser, and Uwe Schmitt on behalf of the Swiss RSE Community Team

EPFL Community Building Workshop

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 11:00:00 +0000

After one year of renewed interest in RSEs at EPFL, we set out to define how we want to go forward. With representatives of nearly all RSE groups at EPFL, we worked on filling out the Minimum Viable Community canvas. It was a fun experience and is the start of a working on a more consolidated RSE representation at EPFL.

Community Canvas

All the hard workers…

After a fun 1 hour workshop, based on the community-canvas, we finished with the following first proposal for our RSE community at EPFL:

Our next step is to continue refining these findings, and put them in practice. The most important part is to figure out what makes most sense at EPFL to have a more official RSE community: do we need to create an association? What is the most EPFL way to do so?

If you want to discuss these findings with us, please join us on the RSE-EPFL.

Human Resources are conducting a survey on 'Defining careers related to research data management and software engineering in the ETH Domain'

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to share the following announcement from Measure 5 of the ETH domain ORD funding programme.

Please complete the survey at this link to help promote the RSE job title and improve hiring and career opportunities for RSEs within the ETH domain.

Whether you are a dedicated Research Data Manager, Research Software Engineer, or a researcher who manages data or software as a part of your work, we want to hear from you!

We invite you to take part in a short survey, created by the HR departments of the ETH Domain institutions, which aims to better understand roles, employment conditions, and training opportunities in this area. Your input will help strengthen and shape future career paths for research data and software engineering professionals within the ETH Domain.

The survey takes about 13 minutes to complete, and responses are anonymous unless you choose to share your contact information.

Please complete the survey at this link.

Your participation is highly valued as every response helps build a more complete picture of how research data management and software engineering work are supported across our institutions.

Thank you for contributing your perspective!

Kind regards, Karsten Bugmann Head of Human Resources & Services, ETH Board – Project Lead

and

The ORD Measure 5 Project Team

Please contact John Griffin, John.griffin@sl.ethz.ch, for any questions.

Open Research Devroom at FOSDEM: Call for Participations

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The upcoming FOSDEM conference in Brussels on 31 January and 1 February 2026 will feature an Open Research Devroom, with previous editions covering many RSE-related topics. A list of these topics from 2025 can be found at https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/research/

From https://research-fosdem.github.io/:

We invite developers and users of open tools and technologies used in a research and investigation context to contribute to the 2026 edition of FOSDEM in Brussels, the largest open-source conference in Europe.

We understand research as the general process of knowledge production and inquiry. This includes scientific research, investigative journalism, data journalism, OSINT, as well as research and investigations undertaken by NGOs, civil society, community and activist groups, etc.

The deadline for submitting proposals is 1 Dec 2025.

You can find more details at https://research-fosdem.github.io/.

EPFL RSE Lightning Talks

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Another wonderful RSE Lightning Talks at EPFL. Thanks to all the presenters for taking the time to prepare what they care about and are currently working on. This was also one of the first events where we had half of our audience on zoom! Click on the post for links to the slides.

Talks and slides

Carine Dengler, Edward Andò: Towards more digital independency as a research engineer
Reto Trappitsch: Rusty way to store samples at liquid nitrogen temperatures
Anonymous: MS IMAP Woes - how to make your email client work (anyway)

Ongoing discussions

We had various interesting discussions, and would like to invite everybody to continue the discussion on our matrix channels:

https://rse.swiss/communication/

Open Source Software Service@EPFL and Beyond

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Center for Digital Trust (C4DT)’s bi-annual open source services meet-up took place on the 9th October at EPFL and - for the first time - remotely, to extend the discussion beyond EPFL. As always, the meet-up is an opportunity for meeting and discussing how open source software services can have a positive impact in our environment.

You can download the slides from the presentations here.

Programme

Nicolas Borboën (EPFL, IS Academic Services): “Mastodon à l’EPFL”
Cenk Yildiz (EPFL, Swiss Plasma Center): “ipxe and ansible : how i stopped carrying USB and love the network”
Olivier Steiner (FHNW): “First experiences of using the Matrix platform for qualitative research in the ongoing SNSF project, ‘YouOnPart’”

A Look Back at This Years EnhanceR Symposium

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

More than 100 people from all over Switzerland attended this years EnhanceR Symposium which took place on September 4th at HEG-FR in Fribourg.

Summary

The theme, Swiss RSE in Action, attracted research IT professionals and members of the young but growing Swiss Research Software Engineering (RSE) community. It provided an opportunity to meet, exchange ideas and collaborate, with the registration data showing that around 50% of attendees were first-timers.

After a welcome by EnhanceR Assembly President Anusch Bachofner and Champak Beeravolu Reddy from the local organising team, the symposium opened with a well received keynote by Imanol Schlag from the ETH AI Center. His talk, “Building Open-Source, Transparent, and Multilingual Large Language Models in Switzerland,” was especially timely, coming just days after the launch of Apertus, the Swiss LLM model, for which he was one of the main architects. Unsurprisingly, the audience engaged with the speaker by asking many questions, which were unfortunately limited due to the schedule.

In the afternoon, Sylvain Corlay (CEO of QuantStack and co-organiser of PyData Paris) delivered a thought-provoking keynote titled Scaling Jupyter to Millions of Users. He presented recent updates about Jupyterlite and how it can be used to deploy Jupyter notebooks to many users without the need for backend server infrastructure, offering easy access to educational resources at low cost.

A new feature of this year’s symposium was the six workshops that were voluntarily contributed by attendees. These workshops sparked engaging discussions and exchanges:

Connecting code, data & compute for collaborative research with Renku
Deploy a FAIR Python application in 30 minutes using Gradio
Building Communities That Work: A Hands-On Workshop on Fighting Noise in Developer Forums
RSEs and Data Stewards: Finding Synergies
Exploring Drug Repurposing for Autoimmune Diseases with DeepLife’s Cell Blueprint
Understanding the Value of Nix for Stable Development – The Fun Way

The workshops stood out for their diversity—not only in topics, ranging from software tools to community building and biomedical applications, but also in format, from brainstorming and structured discussion to feature demonstrations, data exploration, and hands-on coding.

As in previous years, the symposium featured popular show-and-tell sessions to offer attendees more visibility of their work and projects. Fifteen presentations covered a wide range of topics, including project management, high-performance computing, data management, software engineering and demonstrations of research software.

Equally important were the informal exchanges over coffee and lunch breaks. These moments offered space for participants to connect, share experiences, and spark new collaborative ideas.

We look forward to seeing how these synergies will shape upcoming activities within EnhanceR and the wider RSE network - and to welcoming everyone again at the EnhanceR Symposium 2026!

Slides

The slides from the presentations, workshops and show-and-tell sessions are available here.

Image Gallery

Photos by Niklaus Lang.

Swiss RSE Survey

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Are you based in Switzerland and involved in developing software to advance research? For example, are you a PhD student, researcher or professional software developer? Or do you plan to become an RSE? Do you manage a group of Research Software Engineers? If so, please help us by filling out the survey.

The RSE4ORD project created this survey to gain a better understanding of the current RSE landscape in Switzerland and its needs.

Filling out the survey helps shape the community and focus on its needs more adequately. A sufficient number of responses will also provide us with data that we can use to advocate for RSEs, including their recognition, job opportunities, and career paths.

The survey is anonymous and should take no longer than 10 minutes to complete.

Now is better than never.

Source: The Zen of Python

To take part in the survey, please use this link.

You can also support us by sharing this survey with other people who might be interested.

Career-focused DevExchange in WSL

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by a similar event at EAWAG, we held an internal Career-focused DevExchange event at WSL. We had 4 research software engineers among ourselves highlighting their career paths so far and their expectations and experiences with software engineering at WSL. We also discussed the possibilities that they see for an improvement in software engineering at WSL.

Our Event Story

Welcome and Agenda: Ionut Iosifescu Enescu
Presentations
- Enikö Fey
- Ranita Pal
- Dominik Haas
- Christoph Tellenbach
Discussions

How our event ran

We had some very interesting presentations from colleagues who have backgrounds in industry and academia. Each of the speakers presented a bit of their life’s journey prior to becoming a Research software engineer and how their path led them to their careers today. The driving factors for their careers turned out to be pretty diverse - forests, data management, design and coding.

Positive highlights for typical RSE at WSL:

Feels motivated and enjoyed working in environmental research.
Exploring and experimenting a variety of topics.
Quality over quantity.
Ability to control the workload percentage to manage work-life balance.
Ability to work in all parts of the project and holding a major share of the responsibilities.

Improvements to be noted:

Practicing the culture of giving tips to colleagues to tackle different problems.
ETH domain has educational requirements for promotions but no definite structure for continuing education and no dedicated time percentage for upskilling.
More high level exchanges among colleagues would be welcome.

Since some of our colleagues are on the search for future job positions we also got some valuable feedback to make this process smoother. Some of these suggestions include

Call or contact if details are provided for a position.
It is assumed that most of the positions go unadvertised. Need to make use of connections to know about those or asking the HR about appropriate positions.
Participation in Developer events like meetups and forming connections.
Managing expectations from a job position - getting minimum requirements, clear communication, workload capacities.

EnhanceR Symposium 2025: Registration is open

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

📢 On behalf of the EnhanceR and Research Software Engineering (hashtag#RSE) communities in 🇨🇭Switzerland, we would like to invite you to the upcoming EnhanceR Symposium.

🌐 The symposium will take place on 4 September 2025 at HEG-FR in Fribourg, Switzerland, and will focus on Swiss hashtag#RSE in Action. For more information and registration, please visit https://symposium.enhancer.ch/.

📝 During the registration process you will also have the opportunity to submit a contribution for a show-and-tell session or a workshop.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Imanol Schlag, research scientist at the ETH AI Center and co-lead of the LLM effort of the Swiss AI Initiative and Dr. Sylvain Corlay, founder and CEO of QuantStack, a company specialising in open-source software for scientific computing will be our keynote speakers.

We would be delighted to welcome 🙋 you to the symposium and kindly ask you to 📨 forward the invitation internally to interested colleagues or to other interested parties.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at: symposium01@adminenhancermeta.googleorgchcom .

With best regards,

Your EnhanceR symposium organisation team

RSEs as active contributors to build scientific communities around ORD

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 10:53:30 +0200

The meeting on “RSE, ORD, and DMP” was a big success! We discussed how RSEs can participate in Open Research Data, and what Data Management Plans can do for the engineers and the projects. For a lot of the RSEs present, DMP was a new acronym. But thanks to Gilles Dubochet from EPFL’s Open Science, and Chiara Gabella from the EPFL library, we got a better idea what DMPs are, and where they can help us.

Gilles Dubochet for the introduction.

After Gilles’ introduction, we split in four groups, in order to discuss the following subjects:

TLDR: in the group, only 1 out of 4 RSE actually used a well-defined DMP. So while it helps, most RSEs are not aware of DMPs and how to use them!

Call to Action: read up on DMPs! Either EPFL guidelines or DMP OPIDoR.

2. What does FAIR offer to research in general, and to ORD specifically, and where does it fall short?

TLDR: FAIR is very useful, but is not always easy to implement: specifically the Interoperable and Reproducible part is hard, and needs to be defined beforehand, how long it should hold.

Call to Action: define your FAIR principles beforehand!

3. What topics are RSEs working on at EPFL, and which of them are linked to ORD and need DMPs?

4. Search for successful non-EPFL communities in ORD and search for a common theme of success (and what about software?).

TLDR: While a community can grow organically from a small project, most often it’s funding from states which uphold the community and the servers. So it’s a mix of getting together the right people, and then finding the money :)

Call to action: Choose your community wisely

EnhanceR Symposium 2025: Call for contributions

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are looking for contributions for the EnhanceR symposium 2025 which will take place on 4 September 2025 in Fribourg.

About

The EnhanceR Symposium is a one-day event for RSEs and Research IT professionals and offers a unique opportunity to

Share your experiences - both successes and valuable lessons learned.
Learn directly from your peers in Swiss academia.
Collaborate to advance the field of research software engineering in Switzerland.

You can find more details at https://symposium.enhancer.ch/.

The event will be free to attend and tickets will be issued on a first-come, first-served basis up to a limit of 140 seats.

Call for contributions

We are looking for contributions from a range of areas relevant to our community:

Show-and-tell sessions: Share software you developed, a specific project, tool or technique. These are 30 Minute sessions including Q&A and discussions.
Workshops: Lead a hands-on session or facilitate a discussion on a topic, 45 or 90 minute sessions.

Examples for workshops include, but are not limited to:

Hands-on sessions focusing on specific techniques (e.g., advanced Git workflows).
Effective data management strategies and techniques.
Implementing best practices for reproducible, ethical, inclusive, and collaborative data science and research, following principles like those championed by The Turing Way.
Strategies for scaling up RSE initiatives within Switzerland.
Project management methodologies tailored for research software projects.
Navigating the role and challenges of an RSE.

Would you like to help shape the EnhanceR Symposium? Please submit your idea using this form this form by 8 June 2025.

Results of the RSE logo community vote

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We closed the poll on 8 April and are pleased to announce the winner:

We got a grand total of 104 submissions, and we’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who took part. This was much more than we expected!

We’re also very grateful to everyone who took the time to give us more detailed feedback, we are already working on incorporating some of your suggestions to finalise the logo.

Last but not least, a big thank you to Dietmar Bottler. He came up with the ideas and he’s also going to finalise the logo design for us.

How did we decide the Winner?

We gave assigned score from 4 points (first place) down to 0 points to each of your preferences, and the final results are:

		Total points
Variant 1	Link	222	░░░░░░░░░░
Variant 2	Link	242	░░░░░░░░░░░
Variant 3	Link	342	░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
Variant 4	Link	147	░░░░░░
Variant 5	Link	133	░░░░░░

Open Source Software Services meet-up

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Center for Digital Trust (C4DT) welcomed participants from all over EPFL to the Spring edition of our Open Source Services meet-up on March 25th. As usual, the meet-up is an opportunity for EPFL’s open source community to gather and exchange ideas and experiences. The first part of the meet-up was a round of lightning talks followed by break-out discussion groups to allow participants to dive deeper into the topics. The meet-up was wrapped up by an open-ended pizza lunch where participants could continue to chat about their experiences running and using OSS services at EPFL.

The presentations covered:

“The Email Paradox: Navigating Decentralization, Centralization, and the Future of Communication”, by Jonas Sulzer and Yoan Giovannini (gnugen)
“LibreChat - Chat like a pro”, by Linus Gasser (C4DT)
“FOSS by/for EPFL researchers”, by Francesco Varrato (EPFL library)

We’re looking forward to the next edition in the Fall ‘25!

First RSE community event at WSL Birmensdorf

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 09:18:35 +0100

With financial support from the Open Research Data (ORD) Program of the ETH Domain , we have also started to establish an RSE community at WSL, and link it with the communities already available at other institutions such as ETHZ, EPFL or EMPA.

On February 3rd, 2025, more than 40 people attended the first RSE@WSL in-person meetup at WSL Birmensdorf. The event started with several guest presentations from Empa and ETH Zurich.

From Empa, Anusch Bachofner described the “Build-up of Scientific IT @ Empa”, managing to grow the Scientific IT team from 2 people in 2018 to currently 7 people, and Aliaksandr (Sasha) Yakutovich shared more details about the “Data & Software Community @ Empa”.

From ETH Zurich, Uwe Schmitt presented an overview of “The RSE movement”, as “an initiative to emphasise the importance of software in research and academia”, and Tarun Chadha presented the progress towards an “RSE community buildup in Switzerland”, a community initiated by ETH Zurich and further developed in the frame of the ORD project RSE4ORD: building a research software engineering community to promote open science.

The open discussion that followed was energising, covering many thought-provoking topics such as how to level the playing field and to improve the quality of coding for researchers (e.g. with guidelines and getting access to help and training from professional software engineers), boilerplate and standardised code being shared in the community (for certain generic purposes and applications), how to raise the value of produced research software and how to deal with long term software maintenance in a research institution with non-permanent contracts.

Community Voting: Logo Ideas

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 09:18:35 +0100

We are working on a Swiss wide RSE community website. We have a couple of logo ideas and we would like your input to decide which idea we should develop further.

You can find the ideas in our survey.

Please submit your preferences by Tuesday, April 8.

Call for presentations

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 09:18:35 +0100

Do you want to share your work, make an announcement or present something that you think will benefit the RSE community? We are looking for presenters for upcoming events!

You can submit presentations from 5 minutes to 45 minutes, either on-site or via Zoom, using this form. We will contact you after submission.

This is not a call for a specific event, but we would like to collect presentations for possible future events.

Thanks,

Your RSE working group.

Code publishing good practices guidelines

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The ENAC-IT4R team was delighted to have us for a working session on updating their resources « Code publishing Good practices guidelines ».

Various discussions were held around the different topics, and ENAC vows to keep their list updated which you can find here:

ENAC IT4R - scroll to the end of the page

As a reminder, you’re also welcome to our weekly ENAC-IT4R’s team Tech meeting. The aim is to stay up-to-date with latest data and software technologies relevant to our ENAC research community, on and off campus 🙂 Living schedule.

Call for funding RSE Ambassadors

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 09:18:35 +0100

Dear all,

we are pleased to announce that the EnhanceR association offers funding for RSE ambassadors from academic/research institutions for one year:

Institutions which are members of the EnhanceR association with 10,000 CHF,
Institutions which are not EnhanceR members with 5,000 CHF.

RSE Ambassadors advocate for and support the Research Software Engineer (RSE) community. They play a crucial role in raising awareness about the importance of research software engineers in academia and research institutions.

RSE Ambassadors facilitate networking and collaboration within the community. They also engage in organising meetings, outreach activities, sharing best practices and help to increase the visibility of the RSE community in Switzerland.

We particularly encourage applications from volunteers from academic institutions with no or very early-stage RSE communities.

You can find all details about this call this document.

The deadline for submission is 23 March 2025.

Community voting results for the domain name of a Swiss-wide RSE website

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 09:18:35 +0100

The results are in, and the winner (🥁🥁🥁🥁) is rse.swiss!

Together with EnhanceR we will now apply for the domain name rse.swiss. The process is a bit complicated (see here) and and if our application does not go through, we would proceed with the second place winner rse-ch.org.

We got 79 responses in total, the average rankings for the offered options are (lower is better):

Domain name	Average Ranking
rse.swiss	2.2
rse-ch.org	2.43
swiss-rse.org	2.52
ch-rse.org	2.85

Some people have asked why we have not offered rse.ch as an (obvious) option. The simple answer is, that this domain name is not available and the current owner did not show any interest in selling the name.

December Lightning Talks

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 08:28:19 +0200

Thanks for all the persons present for the December Lightning Talks! It was as always great fun with good discussions.

Son Pham-Ba - Local “AI” generated images
Valérian Rousset - CDD/CDI workgroup return
Ahmed Elghareeb - Environmental Impact of AI and its supply chain

And a picture at the end:

Applying for RSE jobs: Panel discussion

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 09:18:35 +0100

This blog entry is a collaborative effort by members of the audience to consolidate their personal notes and impressions from the event on 15 October 2024 at ETH Zurich.

For more details about the event, including a full list of panellists, please visit the more detailed event page .

The impressions below are therefore based on the discussions within the panel and with the audience and may be different for other employers. Nevertheless, the panel agreed on most of the points below.

Research Software Engineers (RSEs) work in a variety of software development-related roles in academia, and this job profile can provide you with a career option between an academic career and leaving academia to work in industry. However, since this role is only recently gaining recognition, there is still a lot of confusion about it in the scientific community.

Essentially, the question of whether you are an RSE already, without realising, can be answered fairly simply: If you apply coding expertise or develop research software for advancing research and you enjoy doing so, then you are an RSE.

But what exactly does a job as an RSE entail, and how to secure an RSE position? To shed some light on these principal questions the RSE@ETH hosted a panel discussion titled “Applying for RSE Jobs“ on October 15, 2024, at the ETH Hönggerberg campus.

The event gathered a diverse group of professionals actively involved in hiring RSEs from different organisations, including Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), EPFL’s Center for Digital Trust (C4DT), the Center for Climate Systems Modelling (C2SM, ETHZ), the Scientific IT Services of ETH, the Science IT unit of the University of Zurich (UZH), Nexus and IBM Research Zurich.

During the discussion, the panellists addressed key questions, such as:

How can you make your application stand out when applying for RSE positions?
What skills and experiences are most valued by employers hiring RSEs?
How can you find a position that aligns with your career goals and offers a healthy work-life balance?

In this blog post, we aim to summarise the most important insights from the panel, sharing everything from the no-gos to actionable advice on how to get started in your job search.

Key lessons

The following insights are based on the discussions and answers among the panellists.

The two extremes: Scientific programmer vs. Software engineer

RSEs tend to work between two extremes. On one end, as scientific programmers they can come from a specialised background where, they conduct research directly and use code as their primary tool to do so. One the other end, as software engineers they tend to take on a service role, supporting other researchers with their work. They often come from various backgrounds and their day-to-day business includes preparing research code (e.g. performance optimisations), applying DevOps practices to deploy the code, as well as monitoring and maintaining the resulting product.

Most RSEs don’t fall neatly into one or the other category, but will tend towards one. Before applying for a position, try to figure out which of the two you prefer and whether the RSE position you are looking at matches your expectation.

Bonus tip if you are unsure: Talk to RSEs who are already a few years “ahead” of you in their career and have a similar background to you. Many will be happy to guide you!

Demonstrating your skills beyond your CV

Just like for scientists and software engineers it pays to build up a portfolio that you can show in public. A CV in the classic academic style, e.g. listing publications and attended scientific conferences, tends to be less meaningful for an application to an RSE position. We RSEs are in the lucky position that we get to use both scientific and code contributions to our advantage. For example, include papers or public GitHub repositories that you have worked on in your CV or motivation letter. Also contributions to open source projects, relevant blog articles, talks or engagement in a local RSE group can make your application stand out.

An opportunity is just around the corner: this December, our community is organising an event on software tools. Sharing your favourite tool or participating in the discussions can be a great way to get started.

What hiring managers are looking for

First off, communication and presentation skills can be as important as technical skills. You can build them with community work, by reaching out to people for informal discussions over coffee, taking courses (for example at the Language Center) and other ways you feel comfortable with. Since an RSE has to work directly with and for scientists, understanding their requirements and communicating the coding progress well is particularly important.

On that note, hiring managers want to see genuine interest and people who can get excited about projects that are not their own and might even be outside their comfort zone in terms of expertise. The service mentality to provide coding expertise (companies, researchers etc.) is in the foreground.

In many projects you will mostly work by yourself for the client, so independent work and self-management are often equally important. Hiring managers search for “pragmatism” to solve day-by-day problems. Having worked in industry after academia can be a plus in your CV.

Also note that an RSE application should not resemble a Postdoc application. Focus less on scientific achievements and instead highlight and prove your technical and interpersonal skills.

Application strategies and job interviews

In the haste of today’s job environment it might be tempting to send out as many applications as possible, hoping that one will stick. But this can actually work against you as multiple applications to the same company or even group are often noticed and can make you seem desperate.

Focusing on nailing a single application will increase your chances of actually getting an interview.

The panellists had different opinions about the importance of the motivation letter. Some argued that in the age of Chat GPT, the motivational letter has lost its importance, while others felt that a personalised motivational letter can still stand out.

In order to nail your application, you can try to figure out who will read your application and address them directly. Try to personalise your application towards the job in obvious ways to show that you really care and you are not just sending generalised applications to many different positions.

And note that different interviewers care about different things: some prefer evidence of prior work in the form of published papers or open-source contributions while others put more emphasis on the motivation letter or a presentation during the interview. If the interviewer’s contact is listed in the job opening, try to contact them and ask what they care about most. This can also double up as making a good first impression.

During the interviews, some employers do coding tasks, life or offline via email, pair programming, or have candidates debug code. Some also ask candidates to present a topic that they must prepare.

When you get a chance to present yourself during an interview, speak out loud to show what you are thinking during an interview, especially if you are unsure about the answer. The interviewers are more interested in your thought process than the actual solution. Also use coffee breaks on the “interview day” to show genuine interest and get to know the group. This also helps you decide if they are a good fit.

If ever an interview does not work out, asking your interviewer whether they know of other positions in the company that you might be a good fit for can even give you an edge for that position as you might get an internal recommendation.

Work-life balance

A work-life balance, which works out for you personally, is highly dependent on your needs. On one side, most academic institutions allow for part-time positions and do not ask you to work outside working hours.

On the other side, some companies understand the RSE role as a technical consultant, where duly project completion and service mentality are prioritised.

This being said, some companies allow for flexible planning schedules to fit your personal circumstances. Ultimately, your job should fit your private life, so it allows you to follow your personal interests, not vice versa.

Work-life balance is important: Most institutions in the academic environment allow for part-time positions and want you to rest outside of working hours. Some companies give you a lot of freedom in planning your schedule.

On the job (and permanent positions)

In many RSE or Scientific IT groups, there is a mix of temporary and permanent positions.

The question of securing a permanent versus a temporary position is highly dependent on your level of experience. If you are just starting your career, you may not need to worry about the contract duration of a job offer. At this stage of your career you can dare to try something new and completely different, as long as it makes you happy. Search for a job, where you can identify with the company’s values and the position appears exciting and interesting to you. It will pay off to show that you are doing your best and are motivated to learn and improve.

Be active and dare to speak your mind, if you think there is a better solution to a task. Someone will notice your efforts - and who knows? Maybe you will get offered a permanent position as a result of your work.

In response to the question, “What skills do you think are most lacking in junior RSEs?“, pragmatism came up. Looking for simple solutions that meet the given requirements and are maintainable is more appreciated than building an all-bells and whistles solution that goes over budget and turns out to be a maintenance nightmare.

In some situations, you may need to say “no” if a client asks for something that is not reasonable and you can propose a better alternative. Instead of “No“ you can also say “Yes, but …“ if you are uncomfortable saying “No“.

Conclusion

The role of the Research Software Engineer is still emerging and often goes by various titles such as Scientific Programmer, Software Engineer or Data Scientist. This diversity in naming can make it challenging to find and identify RSE job postings. We hope that, moving forward, the umbrella term “RSE“ will gain broader recognition, simplifying the job search process for aspiring professionals in this field.

Within our community, we believe that Research Software Engineering is a crucial component of successful research in today’s digitalised world. Nearly every scientific discipline now relies heavily on sophisticated methods for data collection and analysis, from high-performance computing (HPC) clusters to automated experimental setups.

As the demand for advanced software solutions in research grows, RSEs play an important role in ensuring that scientific investigations are not only reproducible but also have a meaningful impact. This increased reliance on software underscores the RSE career path as both promising and essential for the future of research. This also means that RSE positions are available in fields you never would have thought to work in but perfectly fits your set of programming skills. Therefore, think closely about what your software skills are, what skills you want to acquire and how the job at hand aligns with that.

We hope that the insights and lessons shared from our panel discussion will be valuable to you as you consider your future career options. Whether you are contemplating becoming an RSE or exploring related positions like Data Scientist in industry, these perspectives can guide you in making informed decisions and help you navigate the exciting opportunities that lie ahead.

October Lightning Talks

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 13:28:19 +0200

It was a pleasure meeting you all for the lightning talks! Thanks for the presentators and the public for the questions. We had the following talks:

Carine Dengler: Local LLMs for fun, profit and nonsense
Nicolas Richart: Spack - a package manager for HPC that can be use on any machine
Uwe Schmitt (ETHZ): pytest-regtest - a pytest plugin for snapshot testing

In addition, we also discussed new projects for the RSEs at EPFL and beyond. Here is a non-binding list of ideas we had:

Workgroups
- RSEs and CDD / CDI
- Survey of RSEs (contracts, other activities, preferred days)
- ch-rse.org website
- Environmental impact of our IT projects
Book clubs (ETHZ is doing one on Pragmatic Programmer)
Other social activities (joining the existing ones)
Annual CH-wide meeting
Training sessions, also with PhD students
RSE exchange between groups

As always, don’t forget to:

Join our channel on matrix: RSE-EPFL or the RSE-CH space
Join our mailing list RSE-digest

"Hacking4Sciences" course from MTEC

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 09:18:35 +0100

Do any of the following statements sound familiar to you or someone you know?

I have a non-computer science background.
I want to incorporate programming into my approach to working with data.
I want to be part of the open source ecosystem.

If so, the lecture “Hacking for Sciences – An Applied Guide to Programming with Data” by Dr. Matthias Bannert from the Swiss Economic Institute (KOF) at MTEC-ETH might be the right fit for you.

Learn how to construct a Cloropeth map:

By taking this course, you can learn how to better manage and visualise data. An example of what you could learn is how to construct a Cloropeth map: which maps the values of a variable available by region to a given continuous colour palette on a map.

To construct this map, you can get a definition of the shape of a country, here we use GeoJSON. Then you assign values to the different regions, and finally you can visualise this using the charting function from the {echarts4r} package. Below is the code used to create this map.

 1library(echarts4r)
 2library(viridisLite)
 3library(jsonlite)
 4
 5json_ch <- jsonlite::read_json(
 6 "https://raw.github..."
 7)
 8
 9
10d <- data.frame(
11 name = c("Zürich",
12 "Ticino",
13 "Zentralschweiz",
14 "Nordwestschweiz",
15 "Espace Mittelland",
16 "Région lémanique",
17 "Ostschweiz"),
18 values = c(50,10,100,50,23,100,120)
19)
20
21d |>
22 e_charts(name) |>
23 e_map_register("CH", json_ch) |>
24 e_map(serie = values, map = "CH") |>
25 e_visual_map(values,
26 inRange = list(color = viridis(3)))

The full interactive example can be found in the Hacking4Sciences course book

This highly interactive, block-style online course provides valuable big-picture guidance, teaches practical software development skills, and allows you to test your knowledge through a final group coding project. The course is open to PhD students at ETH, and interested guests or students at other levels are also welcome.

To learn more about the course and its philosophy, please visit the h4sci website https://h4sci.github.io.

"Basics of Computing Environments for Scientists" course from ISG DPHYS

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 09:18:35 +0100

Do any of the following statements sound familiar to you or someone you know?

I have taken a Python course but am having problems with the setup or the correct way to install packages.
I want to know how to use my computer’s command line efficiently.
I’m interested in Python tools, e.g. for checking Python code.
I’m not sure which editor or development environment to use for Python development.
I’m interested in best practices to increase my productivity when working with Python.

The lecture “Basics of Computing Environments for Scientists” from the IT Support group of the ETH Physics department covers these and many other topics that are often missing in many programming courses.

The lecture is open for all members of ETH Zurich and the lecture notes are available at https://compenv.phys.ethz.ch/.

RSECon24 - The RSE Community conference 2024

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 09:18:35 +0100

The UK conference for the research software engineering community, RSECon24, was held in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on 3-5 September. The yearly conference is organised and run by a team of volunteers from the Society for Research Software Engineering RSESoc and is offered as a hybrid conference with 400 attendees onsite and around 80 online this year.

The organisers aim to provide a relevant, inclusive and engaging conference experience for the RSE community, with a balanced and varied programme that caters for all roles and skill levels, celebrating achievements and showcasing impactful software in research.

An important aspect of this is to create an environment where people from all backgrounds can fully participate and contribute, ensuring that each attendee feels valued, respected and empowered to learn and grow.

Personal impressions Uwe Schmitt

This was my third time at the conference and I always appreciate and enjoy the welcoming and open atmosphere. My focus is less on the technical presentations and workshops and more on discussing and sharing experiences and challenges in my work as an RSE and, since last year, connecting with and learning from the community building experiences of many of the attendees.

My visit began with the Monday satellite event for RSE Leaders and Aspiring Leaders, which offered a series of lightning talks and engaging breakout discussions on “What makes a good leader?”.

The most important sessions for me were the two RSE Worldwide sessions with participants involved in building RSE communities from Africa, Asia, the USA, the UK, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Switzerland.

I also attended Linus and Roman’s presentation “Re-runnable Code is all you need”, which also sparked lively questions and discussion and I hope that Linus and Roman will give the presentation at one of our community calls. Due to scheduling conflicts, I was not able to attend all the sessions I was interested in, but the session I regretted missing the most was the BoF session “Project Management in Research Software - People and Processes”.

As in previous years, I benefited a lot from this one week to get away from my routine and busy schedule, to take a fresh look at my work and to get ideas and inspiration. Are you interested in joining next year? Save the date, RSECon25 is taking place on 8-10 September 2025 at the University of Warwick.

Personal impressions Roman Wixinger

To me, RSECon24 was a great opportunity to learn more about creating reproducible computing environments and share my learnings of the last few years together with Linus in a talk. Linus presented in person and I joined the conference remotely. If I had to mention three things that I liked especially about the conference and our community, then it would be collaboration, engagement and learning.

In the weeks before the presentation, people from the community supported our preparations for the talk by sharing their experiences with tools like devbox. Most prominently, Jaime Cardozo created a demo of devbox with Spring Boot that we could use in the presentation. I highly recommend checking his demo, it is the first demo I tested that worked on the first try.

After our presentation, I was overwhelmed by the number of questions and comments by people from the audience. Having people participate in the discussion and not just consume the information was great to see, especially because I did not expect to see this level of engagement.

Last, preparing the proposal for the talk and organising everything was a great learning experience to me. This was my first submission for a talk at a conference, so many things were new to me. However, this experience showed me that it is indeed possible and that there is a whole community at ETH that is here to support you in the process.

Overall, I really enjoyed the experience and would love to see more of our members at RSECon25 next year!

Personal impressions Linus Gasser

This was my second RSE-conference, again in Newcastle like in 2022. I went there together with Ahmed from my team, who is also an RSE. It was much fun gathering with other RSEs, discussing projects, hanging out, participating in the social gatherings (though I missed the Turkish Baths…), and learning new things. I just love the British architecture of the red brick houses. And running along the Ouse Burn with Mahmoud was so nice!

The highlight was of course our talk with Roman on Re-runnable code is all you need, and it went great! Even with the hybrid setting, Roman presenting from Zurich, and me in Newcastle, all was smooth and the audience was very engaged in the topic. We see now other projects using devbox and hope that this will be a small participation for making RSE projects more reproducible.

Besides that I also tried to spread the love for Matrix and had fun helping the R contributors setting up their first matrix room and linking it to their slack channel. Let’s hope others will follow :)

Thanks to Uwe for the great beer-places and Indian food…

Code Review Day on 28th of August

Sat, 27 Jul 2024 09:18:35 +0100

Dear RSE members,

Have you ever had the feeling that you need way too much time to understand what your code does? Then I am happy to announce the next code review day on Wednesday 28th of August at the HIT building. We’ll be looking at your code and help you to improve it.

Common topics so far were:

writing unit and functional tests, a simple way to improve your code
what data structures to use for which problem
and many more

Write me an email if you want to participate, marco.gaehler@gmx.ch. Most topics are also explained in my book available at https://github.com/gaehlerm/SoftwareEngineering and let me know if you have some feedback on my book.

Enjoy the summer,

Marco

RSE Lightning Talks on July 10th, 2024

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 13:55:40 +0200

Illuminating Presentations were done

Our lineup of lightning talks is sure to spark your curiosity:

Valérian Rousset: WebAssembly introduction: Discover the power of WebAssembly, use cases, language support Presentation
Bryan Perdrizat: Do you really know git? Presentation
Reto Trappitsch: Packaging Python CLIs and GUIs for air-gapped machines Presentation

Thanks for the three presenters, and all the people participating in the discussions on these topics.

Our next RSE lightning talks will probably be in September.

RSE book club

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 09:18:35 +0100

Hi everyone,

I’m Marco and would like to organise a book club for the RSE community. The idea is to meet every two weeks to discuss a chapter from my book about Software Engineering.

The book is in development and available at github.

The preliminary schedule is to meet for one hour every second Thursday from 12:30 to 13:30 on zoom. The first meeting would be on June 20. Even if you don’t have time then, you can still sign up. Maybe we’ll change the schedule at some point.

In the first meeting we’ll have a look at the chapter about classes and best practices on how to use them. Feel free to read other books as well or bring along some example code you would like to discuss. Though the code snippets should be fairly short (< 50 lines) or we won’t be able to cover them in one hour.

In case you are interested, please use this form to register. In case you would like to join but the proposed time does not suit you, please let us know in the comments of the registration form.

Cheers, Marco

Zenodo

Thu, 23 May 2024 15:32:12 +0200

From GitHub to Zenodo: pros, cons and integration of the two platforms

As researcher engineers, you understand the importance of efficient version control and collaborative development. GitHub has long been the go-to platform for managing and tracking code changes, but it lacks a built-in mechanism for long-term preservation or citation of code as a research output. This is where Zenodo becomes essential: by assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to uploads, Zenodo easily transforms repositories on GitHub into persistent, citable resources, thereby enhancing the visibility and academic impact of your work. Moreover, you can link your Zenodo account to GitHub to automatically publish each new release of a GitHub repository, without manual uploads.

Supported by OpenAIRE and CERN, Zenodo guarantees the durability of your data for at least 20 years. In the unlikely event that Zenodo shuts down, they promise to migrate all content to another suitable repository, ensuring that all DOIs remain intact. This means your research will stay accessible and citable for the long term. By using Zenodo alongside GitHub, you ensure that your work is not only collaborative and version-controlled but also preserved and easily citable, thereby securing its academic impact and continuity. Additionally, affiliating your work with the EPFL Zenodo Community provides access to best practice recommendations from the Library Research Data Management (RDM) team to enhance the visibility and FAIRness of your datasets and code.

The presentation is here: Github_2_Zenodo_2022

For more information:

Chiara Gabella, Head of team, Research data management, EPFL

Image from https://www.openaire.eu/zenodo-update-collaboration-made-easy

Schedule Meetup on 4th of June 2024

Sun, 19 May 2024 10:44:33 +0100

We published the detailed schedule for the next meetup in our events section.

EPFL RSE Kickoff Meeting

Fri, 10 May 2024 16:38:00 +0200

It was a great pleasure meeting you all for the RSE Kickoff Meeting on the 8th of May 2024. We had a bit more than 30 people, with 20+ being on-site, and 10+ on the zoom call. If you were participating, be sure to check the matrix channel for the feedback form!

Agenda:

Hybrid part (1h):
- Linus Gasser - Welcome
- Peter Schmidt - RSE Origins: A dive into the history of RSE
- Gilles Dubochet - RSEs & Open Science: How RSEs can participate in Open Science
- Chiara Gabella - Open Data Management: Training and support from the EPFL Library
On-site only:
- Community Brainstorm (45’): Group discussions on chosen topics
  followed by
- Networking, Drinks, & Cake: Connect with fellow RSEs!

Don’t forget that you can join all ongoing discussions here:

on matrix for RSE EPFL: RSE-EPFL
on matrix for RSE CH: RSE-CH
our mailing list: RSE-digest

Open_source_services_meet_up_202403

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 13:38:20 +0200

The Center for Digital Trust (C4DT) was excited to host our first Open Source Services Meet-Up at EPFL on March 12th. The meet-up served as an opportunity for members of EPFL’s open source community to gather and share their ideas and experiences. This sharing kicked off with lightning talks which were followed by break-out sessions encouraging attendees to exchange on the subjects that they had voted for prior to the meeting. An informal lunch where participants continued their conversations over pizza concluded the event.

The presentations covered:

Chiara Tanteri overview of the role of the DPO at EPFL,
Charlotte Weil’s presentation of the ENAC-IT service,
Edward Andò introduction of the matrix.epfl.ch instance and
Jonas Sulzer talk on the student association gnugen.

We really enjoyed hosting the meetup and would like to thank the 16 participants, especially the speakers, for taking part in it. To continue fostering open source collaborations at EPFL, the next meetup will take place in Autumn, so stay tuned for its announcement.

Schedule Meetup on 24th of April 2024

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 10:44:33 +0100

We published the detailed schedule for the next meetup in our events section.

Resume of 2nd RSE@ETHZ event

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 19:44:33 +0100

Our RSE community continues to grow and evolve. The recent establishment of working groups and a series of lightning talks highlighted the diverse interests and expertise within our ranks.

In our second event – enjoyed and joined by roughly 90 RSEs – we built upon the foundation established previously, with discussions focused on refining our working group structure and outlining our community’s future direction.

Lightning Talk Highlights & a Deep Dive into Quarto

Following this intro, a set of lightning talks were held with the following highlights:

Solid_dmft: Grey-boxing Correlated Materials - Alberto Carta and Peter Mlkvik presented their experience with RSE in their field.
Brightway Software Framework: From Scattered Pages to Interactive Documentation - Michael Weinold demonstrated how the Brightway framework can improve technical documentation processes.
Research Software Engineering Automating Workflows - Data Scientist Roman Wixinger discussed the value of RSE in streamlining scientific workflows.
Increasing the scope of applications through user configuration - By Loic Hausammann
Speedrun through Retrieval Augmented Generation - Roland Siegbert showcased the possibilities of using LLM-assisted search in paper and thesis databases.

Finally, Matthias Bannert presented an in-depth look at Quarto: https://quarto.org/, a powerful and versatile publishing tool. He covered Quarto’s capabilities for creating reports, books, websites, and more.

The event concluded with a discussion on the evolution of scientific publishing tools. Participants weighed the strengths of LaTeX, the potential of Typst, and the importance of Markdown for technical writing and in Research Software Engineering.

Community Engagement

These activities showcase the strength and potential of our RSE community. If you’d like to get involved, consider joining a working group or participating in future events.

We need your help: Call for contributions to working groups!

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 19:20:35 +0100

Based on the group discussions at the first meeting in February, we decided to initiate working groups.

The topics we suggest are:

Events. E.g. help to organise rooms and speakers, setup casual meetings, and more. Other ideas and suggestions at https://gitlab.com/rse-ethz/working-group-events)
Outreach: E.g. work on website, blog posts, announce RSE community in department or research group meetings. See also https://gitlab.com/rse-ethz/working-group-outreach.
RSE training: E.g. collect and publish training material, offer training activities. (https://gitlab.com/rse-ethz/working-group-rse-training)
RSE community survey: Develop, conduct and evaluate a survey of the RSE community (https://gitlab.com/rse-ethz/working-group-community-survey)

The working groups are an opportunity for anyone interested in actively shaping and developing the RSE community. We do not expect any experience with this type of work and recognise that this is a voluntary role.

Please fill out the form (https://u.ethz.ch/S6xMK) if you are interested in contributing your ideas, sharing and collaborating with like-minded people, and maybe trying something you have never done before. We would then arrange initial meetings to get the working groups started.

New Matrix space for RSE activities in Switzerland

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 19:28:35 +0100

Together with our colleagues from EPFL we decided to create a new Matrix space #rse-ch:matrix.org to host all current and future RSE activities within Switzerland. The rooms from the previous space still exist, but are now also registered within the new space.

You can use the ETH service https://m.ethz.ch/#/#rse-ch:matrix.org to join if you have not already set up a client. All others can add a new space in their client using the identifier #rse-ch:matrix.org.

In case you joined the previous ETH-RSE space:

Please join the new space.
You don’t need to leave any room.
Remove the previous space from your client.

We have no deadline for closing the old space, but encourage all existing members to subscribe to the new space #rse-ch:matrix.org.

The website is ready for community contributions!

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 09:18:35 +0100

We migrated the previous version of the website (which was a bunch of HTML files + some CSS) to HUGO for managing and rendering the content from Markdown to HTML. The new setup allows integration of community contributions, such as blog posts using merge requests.

The new setup

For styling we are using a slightly modified version of the Hextra theme. The modifications are hosted at https://gitlab.com/rse-ethz/hugo-hextra-modified. You can find the setup including the content at https://gitlab.com/rse-ethz/rse.ethz.ch. The README.md in this repository also describes local setup and further details.

The CI setup builds and publishes the web site automatically:

Contribute!

Do you want to improve the current README.md, write a blog entry, or add to the pages on the site? Create a merge request and make https://rse.ethz.ch a little better!

RSE.swiss - The Swiss RSE community – Blog

Open-source software services meet-up: special edition 'Fragilités et souveraineté numérique'

EPFL RSE Lightning Talks

Talks and slides

Mmh - Pizza!

International 2026 RSE survey is now live!

The call for proposals for FAIR competence funding is now open

Preannouncement: ETH Zurich FAIR Competence Funding

RSE Newsletter #1 - 2025Q4

Updates from Switzerland

Building the community

Outreach

Working groups at RSE EPFL

Past events

RSE Survey

Updates from around the world

Conferences

Funding and resources

Additional global updates

Outlook 2026

EPFL Community Building Workshop

Community Canvas

Human Resources are conducting a survey on 'Defining careers related to research data management and software engineering in the ETH Domain'

Open Research Devroom at FOSDEM: Call for Participations

EPFL RSE Lightning Talks

Talks and slides

Ongoing discussions

Open Source Software Service@EPFL and Beyond

Programme

A Look Back at This Years EnhanceR Symposium

Summary

Slides

Image Gallery

Swiss RSE Survey

Career-focused DevExchange in WSL

Our Event Story

How our event ran

Positive highlights for typical RSE at WSL:

Improvements to be noted:

EnhanceR Symposium 2025: Registration is open

RSEs as active contributors to build scientific communities around ORD

1. DMPs and ORD, share your experiments in your lab - the good, the bad, and the ugly.

2. What does FAIR offer to research in general, and to ORD specifically, and where does it fall short?

3. What topics are RSEs working on at EPFL, and which of them are linked to ORD and need DMPs?

4. Search for successful non-EPFL communities in ORD and search for a common theme of success (and what about software?).

EnhanceR Symposium 2025: Call for contributions

About

Call for contributions

Results of the RSE logo community vote

Open Source Software Services meet-up

First RSE community event at WSL Birmensdorf

Community Voting: Logo Ideas

Call for presentations

Code publishing good practices guidelines

Call for funding RSE Ambassadors

Community voting results for the domain name of a Swiss-wide RSE website

December Lightning Talks

Applying for RSE jobs: Panel discussion

Key lessons

The two extremes: Scientific programmer vs. Software engineer

Demonstrating your skills beyond your CV

What hiring managers are looking for

Application strategies and job interviews

Work-life balance

On the job (and permanent positions)

Conclusion

October Lightning Talks

"Hacking4Sciences" course from MTEC

Do any of the following statements sound familiar to you or someone you know?

Learn how to construct a Cloropeth map:

"Basics of Computing Environments for Scientists" course from ISG DPHYS

RSECon24 - The RSE Community conference 2024

Personal impressions Uwe Schmitt

Personal impressions Roman Wixinger

Personal impressions Linus Gasser

Code Review Day on 28th of August

RSE Lightning Talks on July 10th, 2024

Illuminating Presentations were done

RSE book club

Zenodo