Blog

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

February 20, 2025

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.

Applying for RSE jobs: Panel discussion

October 26, 2024

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.

"Hacking4Sciences" course from MTEC

September 19, 2024

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.

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

September 13, 2024

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.

RSECon24 - The RSE Community conference 2024

September 12, 2024

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.

Code Review Day on 28th of August

July 27, 2024

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.