Research Software Engineering Stories
In early 2019 when US-RSE was being established, it was quickly clear that defining a research software engineer would be a challenging task. How could we compare apples and oranges, when one person might be heavily involved in open source software engineering, and another actively publishing, and a third with managerial duties, and a fourth doing administration for HPC?
RSE Stories is not limited to research software engineers in the United States. The host @vsoch happens to be located there, but it’s important that we share stories from across the RSE community, regardless of your geographic location.
Do you want to be interviewed on the show? We’d love to hear your story!
Efforts to Define
While a more rigorous analysis would be warranted, there were several early efforts to start to discuss the definition of RSE:
- Super RSEs was a proposal that hypothesized three dimensions for RSEs.
- The Story of the Research Software Engineer presented the question as a story, and discussed different types of RSEs
- The RSE Phenotype Generator took the stance that the best way to define RSE was to ask people directly, and have them define any number of dimensions and communities served.
- The USRSE Blog can take similar initiative by presenting the work of a small set of self-selected RSEs.
- Why Research Software Engineers touched on the topic by describing the need for RSEs.
A Limited Scope
Do you see the issue with any of the above links? The challenge is that they come from a single (or small number) of perspectives. In fact, the most compelling definitions for what encompasses a research software engineer must come from the community itself. For this reason, we’ve created this podcast series to tell the stories of the hidden faces of research software engineering.
How do I get involved?
There are many ways to get involved, and because of the time committments for just a few folks to run a podcast, even the tiniest of contributions is hugely appreciated!
- be a guest on the show: If you are interested in being interviewed for our show, please sign up to be interviewed! It requires no preparation, and is low key and relaxed.
- be an editor: While the hosts are happy to do most editing, if you’ve ever edited audio before, you know this is a very time consuming task. Even if you can only offer to edit one episode a year, this is hugely helpful!
- be a host: Have you ever wanted to try interviewing someone? Or maybe recording an episode on a special topic of interest? Whether you want to host just once, once a month, or more regularly, anyone in the rseng community is offered this opportunity. If you are interested, please reach out to @vsoch to start discussion.