The Craftsperson

& The Scholar

James Hetherington

The State of Research Software {.chapter-title}

The SIRO Problem {.diagram2}

PhDWare

• Don't look if anyone's done it before
• Code till it works
• Generate a figure
• Throw it away

Labware

• Understood by one genius
• Implements great science, now
• FORTRAN in any language
• Code not engineered for readability
• Can't add new science

ConsultantWare

• Little understanding of the science
• Overengineered
• Unmaintainable by the research group

Middleware

• Generalise a part of the research problem
• Publish at an eScience conference
• Have no users in the research community

HPCWare

• Get a 5% improvement in performance
• On a particular architecture
• Publish a scaling graph
• Selection against:
  • Readability
  • Maintainability
  • Adaptability

Research Software Engineers {.chapter-title}

The Craftsperson And The Scholar {.diagram2}

Research Software Engineers {.poster #dilstein}

Research Software Engineers

• Not independent researchers
  • No personal research agenda
• Facilitative, supportive, and collaborative
  • Part of the academic community
  • Deep engagement with research groups

Why it works

• People want to be RSEs
• We have been hiding as:
  • RAs who program too much
  • HPC or research group sysadmins

The movement

• We need a name and some status!

Our story

• 2010: Software Sustainability Institute Founded
• April 2012: Idea and name at SSI Collaborations Workshop
• September 2012: UCL Group founded
• 2013: UKRSE Assocation founded
• 2013: Times Higher Education article article

Our story

• 2014: Manchester group
• 2015: Southampton and Cambridge Groups
• Jan 2016: EPSRC awards first Research Software Engineering Fellowships
• 2016: Bristol, Sheffield Groups
• September 2016: First RSE conference, 202 attendees, 14 countries

Our story

• RSE Germany and RSE Netherlands founded
• 2017: Leicester, Imperial College groups.
• September 2017: Second conference, 224 attendees, 12 countries
• Late 2017: UKRSE formally incorporated as a charity
• Late 2017: Second round of UK RSE fellows appointed
• October 2017: Australia and New Zealand RSE founded

RSE Groups {.chapter-title}

RSE Group

• Shared home for RSEs in an institution
• Both academic and Support
• "Science as a Service"

Activities

• Projects
• Consulting
• Training
• Infrastructure

Domain

• From HPC codes to analysis scripts and infrastructure code
• From theoretical physics to digital humanities

UCL Model

• All roles "permanent"
• But funded from research grant income on a pooled basis

The UCL Research Software Group

Readable, reliable, and reproducible

We help make code:

• Last beyond the end of the grant that funded it
• Be usable by someone other than the PhD student who wrote it
• Have a standard of correctness better than "the graph looks about right"

Why work with RSEs? {.chapter-title}

Clean code makes performance possible

LikeLTD

Clean code makes performance possible

LikeLTD

Engineering helps legacy code live

DCProgs

Engineering helps legacy code live

DCProgs

Reliability unlocks science

HemeLB Setup Tool

Reliability unlocks science

HemeLB Setup Tool

Good, huh? {.chapter-title}

Lessons learned

Well, it hasn't always been pretty.

I'll try to indicate some tips and tricks learned while creating a generalist science-as-a-service software group.

Some of these we got right. Some are things I wish I'd known at the beginning.

Sell performance, deliver reproducibility {#flymac .poster}

Sell performance

Deliver reproducibility

Use appropriate technology {#windvane .poster}

Use appropriate technology

Look beyond the usual {#ancient .poster}

Look beyond the usual

Make space to learn {#crafty .poster}

Make space to learn

Organisational Judo {#judo .poster}

Organisational

Judo

Computational Science as a Service {#it-crowd .poster}

Computational Science as a Service

RSEs and Teaching {.chapter-title}

Software Carpentry

RITS's training programme

• Software carpentry
• Data carpentry
• Introductory Python for Data Analysis
• Research Software Engineering with Python
• Research Computing with C++
• High Performance and High Throughput Computing

Digitally native learning tools

• Web-first but classroom- and kindle-ready
  • Single source, multiple formats
• Examples which work:
  • Generated lecture notes from code that is executed and complete
• Open and collaborative
  • CC-BY license on notes
  • Massive cross-institutional co-creation

Active classrooms

• Practicals and concepts together
• Bring your own device
• Post-it-notes and etherpads

The syllabus is full.

• Ideally, everyone would know everything!
• This is clearly impossible
• So we need division of labour
• and enough training to work together

Unicorn Farming {.poster #unicorn}

Multi- professionalism {.chapter-title}

Multiprofessional

RSE combines:

• Researcher
• Coder

Team Research

• RSE
• Data Scientist
• Visualisation
• Interaction
• ...

The Turing Institute {.poster}

Research Engineering at the Turing Institute

• Shared research staff pool
  • RSEs
  • Data Scientists

To finish {.chapter-title}

Beyond the Postdoc {.poster}

The Sith approach

to professional continuity

Why you should have one

• More and more research uses software
• General programmers can't understand research
• Postdocs and PhD students don't have time to make reliable code

Why you should be one

• Write papers
• Make code

This talk

• http://bit.ly/rse-talk-17
• https://github.com/UCL/rsd-talks [CC-BY]

Acknowledgements

• Neil Chue Hong, Simon Hettrick
• Susan Morrell and her team
• Alys Brett, Chris Woods
• Tom Couch
• Mayeul d'Avezac, Jens Nielsen
• Raquel Alegre, Jonathan Cooper, David Perez-Suarez
• James Geddes, Martin O'Reilly