The May RSE Society Newsletter is live! 🎉 Dive in now for fresh RSECon26 updates, new internship & work‑experience stories, and several exciting opportunities closing TODAY - don’t miss out! #RSE #ResearchSoftwareEngineering

https://society-rse.org/may-2026-newsletter/

May 2026 Newsletter - Society of Research Software Engineering

Welcome to the May edition of the RSE Society Newsletter, where we’re thrilled to spotlight a bustling slate of community happenings, from the launch of RSECon26 registration (with a 10 % Society discount) and urgent calls for award nominations, reviewers, bursary applicants, and Emerging Voices (all due by today, 1 June) to the vibrant RSEEE & Women in HPC annual meeting and the inaugural Teaching & Training SIG Community Days in Manchester this July. In this issue you’ll also find fresh opportunities to join the Carpentries’ GenAI‑plus‑Teaching discussions, explore the revamped Strain Database collaboration, and dive into new resources such as the “Software Engineer Career Path” guide and the Generative‑AI community‑vision report. Finally, don’t miss our brand‑new Internship & Work‑Experience section (linked at the bottom) and if you are running such a scheme, do please look at the work the SocRSE EDIA working group is doing gathering stories to inspire and expand mentorship opportunities across our network. Happy reading! RSECon26 News Updates RSECon26 Registration Now Open Secure your spot for the 10th anniversary Research Software Engineering Conference taking place in Sheffield from 9-11 September 2026! You can join us in person or secure a remote access ticket to watch live streams and participate from anywhere in the world. As a valued member of the Society of Research Software Engineering you are entitled to an exclusive 10% discount on your conference ticket. RSECon26 Call for Award Nominations and Reviewers It is time to celebrate the amazing contributions to the Research Software Engineering community! You can nominate colleagues, groups or yourself for a Community Award or the Green RSE Award. Nominations close on 13 July 2026. We are also looking for volunteers to help review these nominations. Reviewers of all experience levels are welcome and the total time commitment is a maximum of 3 hours. Applications to be a reviewer close on 12 June 2026. Urgent Deadlines: RSECon26 Bursaries and Emerging Voices Please note that the deadlines for both the RSECon26 Bursary scheme and the Call for Emerging Voices close Today on 1 June 2026. If financial barriers are preventing you from attending we offer support for travel, accommodation and free registration. Additionally our Emerging Voices session is looking for newcomers to the community to share their stories. Selected speakers receive professional public speaking coaching and mentoring. Apply or nominate someone immediately before the deadline passes! Special Interest and Regional Group Round-up RSEEE & Women in HPC Annual Meeting On 22 April, the John Innes Centre Conference Centre in Norwich hosted the second iteration of this joint annual gathering for the RSE East of England (RSEEE) regional group and the Cambridge & East Anglia Women in HPC chapter. The room was packed with more than 60 attendees from various institutions across the region and the engaging talks covered a wide range of topics, including Artificial Intelligence and its challenges, sustainability in software development, High Performance Computing (HPC) and various tools. This event was supported by the RSE Society and the Technician Commitment initiative. Catch up on what happened at the website. Teaching and Training SIG Community Days Save the date! Join us in Manchester on the 14th and/or 15th July for the inaugural Teaching and Training SIG Community Days. Day 1 will focus on the DisCouRSE funded project “Recognising and rewarding training activity in dRTP roles and departments”., This is your opportunity to help inform development pathways for educators in these teams. Day 2 is the general training community day. We will share the outcomes of the dRTP Training Landscape Survey 2026 and there will be opportunity for collaboration on either scoping new training materials or contribution to the training aspects of the DIRECT skills and competencies framework. Thanks to the SSI for supporting this event. Bursaries will be available to support travel or childcare costs. Community News & Events New Series of Community Discussions on Teaching and GenAI The Carpentries is hosting a new series of GenAI + Teaching Discussions, bringing educators together to share their experiences: the challenges and opportunities they have identified, strategies they have tried in response, and what they learned in the process. Although we expect conversations to place a particular focus on the teaching of computational research skills (programming, data handling and analysis, etc), we welcome all educators at these sessions.The calls will begin on Thursday 18 June, at 13:00 and 20:00 BST. The sessions will begin with an invited presentation from Elle O’Brien, co-author of Scientific Software in the Age of Vibe Coding and A survey of generative AI adoption and perceived productivity among scientists who program, and Director of the AI & Data Science Graduate Data Science Certificate at the University of Michigan. Revamping the Strain Database Together A two-phase collaboration between a research team at Manchester Institute of Biotechnology and the University of Manchester Research Software Engineering team transformed a legacy Strain Database into a modern, scalable platform. The upgrade improved reliability, usability, and flexibility to better support the ongoing research needs of the lab. Call for Internship Stories The SocRSE EDIA working group are collecting stories about internships to raise awareness, encourage and support other teams to create similar opportunities. Please help by submitting your experiences in hosting an internship or work experience opportunity. Research Software Engineering in the Age of Generative AI: Building a Community Vision report The report from the Research Software Engineering in the Age of Generative AI: Building a Community Vision workshop is now available. The workshop, held in March in Edinburgh, UK, brought together participants to explore how Generative AI may reshape the research software ecosystem, and to help inform a broader community vision for the future of the field.Before the workshop, attendees contributed to a draft vision statement that workshop organisers used to identify areas of agreement and difference. A version of this, published as Research Software in an Age of AI-Assisted Development: Reflections from Edinburgh, is intended to provide principles that will guide the community during this time of rapid change. The Software Engineer Career Path: IC Track, Management Track, […]

Society of Research Software Engineering

Alexander spricht heute über IndiScale beim Göttinger #AlumniTag

"Physics, Software and Digital Sovereignty: Developing open source research software at IndiScale"

https://www.alumni-goettingen.de/termine/goettinger-alumni-tag-2026/programm/#physik

#Göttingen #Physik #DigitaleSouveränität #OpenSource #RSE #ResearchSoftwareEngineering @unigoettingen

Göttinger Alumni-Tag 2026 Program

Alumni Göttingen ist eine internationale Gemeinschaft von Ehemaligen, Studierenden, Angehörigen und Freunden der Universität Göttingen

Thanks to @meena for prompting this - it's not like I'm some sort of Superior Programming Being whose every line of code is elegant snd brilliant and not worthy of the sweaty masses. I'm a tediously average programmer. I detest status-driven gatekeeping. I would like to share my work so the effort can be leveraged by others to do new and useful work. I support some ideal of open source circa 1995 where useful decent quality tooling is freely shared and available.

That is not the environment we live in today. Beyond the individual entitled ankle-biters that harass devs for not doing work they want for free, we now have this extreme corporate bullshit of "open source supply chain", that freely-provided _caveat utilitor_ code should be treated like code acquired under a commercial procurement agreement with formal specs, requirements, and standards for security, quality, and lifecycle management.

I work in this space in my day job, I'm the one who sets and verifies those specs for our acquired codes, and I'm going to say flat out, that is that absent an explicit agreement with a supplier, all that supply chain and capital-P procurement activity is *solely* on the code user, not on the code author, full stop. Screw off with that CTO/infosec/bureaucrat thinking. Into the sea with you.

For those of you in the back:
_IF THAT PROCUREMENT AND ASSURANCE WORK IS IMPORTANT TO YOUR ORGANIZATION, YOUR ORGANIZATION NEEDS TO PAY FOR IT_.

Further:
_WITHOUT AN EXPLICIT AGREEMENT, NOBODY IS REQUIRED TO PROVIDE THAT SERVICE TO YOU AT ANY PRICE_.

And finally:
_WHAT PART OF 'USE AT YOUR OWN RISK' IS UNCLEAR TO YOU?_

I will curse all day long about research-grade software being built and distributed by organizations who explicitly know they are working on nuclear safety applications and do not perform adequate diligence in design, implementation, and testing. This goes beyond #ResearchSoftwareEngineering - it's production software engineering practice. These are organizations who absolutely know how their code is used (we have monthly meetings with them). I hold these organizations and individuals to a higher standard because this is quite literally our jobs.

By contrast, this is not the job of @bagder and expecting or demanding he do some corporation's or industry's V&V and SQA work is laughable, expecting him to do it _for free_ is arrogant, insulting, and delusional.

But this is where we are now with sharing our code. Ethically, I believe anyone who puts their code in public bears some personal responsibility to ensure it's of a reasonable level of quality, functionality, and security. It's as if you were bringing homemade food to a potluck - the expectation is that it's edible and not spoiled or adulterated. You aren't expected to disclose every significant allergen, provide a list of ingredients, or a nutritional statement but you're expected to wash your hands, use clean utensils and ingredients of good quality, and ensure the food is cooked all the way through.

That's gatekeeping, absolutely, and I won't apologize for setting that demand or an analogous one for "potluck" software.

I am old enough to remember Matt's Script Archive and I have seen what happens when we don't do this sort of positive gatekeeping. For those unfamiliar, Matt was the Typhoid Mary of insecure internet software and his formmail.pl script was the poster child for bad and dangerous code you found for free on the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt%27s_Script_Archive

And while I appreciate he was a teenager when he posted most of that code, as an adult he was repeatedly told how damaging his code was and yet he kept distributing broken versions for YEARS.

Matt's Script Archive - Wikipedia

Our paper "Future challenges for Research Software Engineering" is out. We looked into what research software engineering might look like in future and what challenges will await us. The paper is based on a community discussion during the deRSE 2025 conference.

#RSE #ResearchSoftwareEngineering

https://doi.org/10.14279/eceasst.v85.2721

Future challenges for Research Software Engineering | Electronic Communications of the EASST

The #NAIRR pilot has evolved from concept to a real shared #AI research platform that connects researchers, educators, industry partners, and national labs. Sandra Gesing, executive director of US-RSE, highlights how this 2-year-old collaborative infrastructure is lowering barriers for teams to fuel creativity, discovery, and possibility.

👉 Read more: https://www.govtech.com/education/higher-ed/2-years-into-nairr-pilot-shared-infrastructure-boosts-ai-innovation/

#RSE #RSEng #ResearchSoftwareEngineering #Innovation #Collaboration #HPC

2 Years Into NAIRR Pilot, Shared Infrastructure Boosts AI Innovation

Providing shared computing power, AI tools and educational support, the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource pilot connects researchers, educators and industry partners pushing boundaries with AI.

GovTech

Can anyone help me find a new server?

I've recently changed my surname and since I want to create a new mastodon account to match, it's a good time to also find a server that might be a better home for me than Fosstodon.org

TBH, I don't use many of the within-instance features, mainly I just look at feeds of people I follow, but I can't be bothered to self-host.

I'm mainly interested in toots about #RSE (#researchsoftwareengineering), #environment, #maker stuff - so maybe there's no best fit!

Our next Hacky Hour will take place Wednesday, 1st October 14:00-15:00. We will meet in the Learning & Teaching Building on in the Union Bar fake lawn. Our Hacky Hours are informal meetings to help with programming problems and related issues (testing, documentation, maintainability, reproducibility). We have experts in programming languages, command line shells, collaborative tools, LaTeX, a number of scientific fields. https://www.strath.ac.uk/science/computerinformationsciences/hackyhour/ #HackyHour #RSE #ResearchSoftwareEngineering
HackyHour | University of Strathclyde

A more complete example would involve a mechanical desk calculator, a slide rule, and mathematical tables like Abramowitz and Stegun ("Handbook of Mathematical Functions") https://www.nist.gov/mathematics-statistics/handbook-mathematical-functions-abramowitz-and-stegun Prior to the use of digital electronic computers, complex numerical problems were translated to manual computing plans and solved by teams of human "computers", often women with degrees in math who were locked out of university and technical jobs.

This is sort of the origin of #researchsoftwareengineering - the relationship between subject matter experts who understand a problem domain and the pure and applied math underpinning a solution and the experts in numerical analysis and computation who could convert that mathematical solution into a plan or program suitable for automatic computation whether the computer was electronic or human.

I'm mainly interested in the evolution of digital computing techniques here but it would take very little to make this a complete example that covered all of 20th century computing and broaches some very uncomfortable facts about gender and race in computing long before ENIAC. Not my primary focus but I'd feel remiss in not calling it out.

Handbook of Mathematical Functions: Abramowitz and Stegun

Date: 1964

NIST
I swear I'm going to get thrown out of the #researchsoftwareengineering community before I actually get into it. I'm not setting impossibly high standards - "show your work" is standard in every branch of math, science, and engineering. Just apparently not when scientists and engineers touch computers.