August 2020 Newsletter

University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering Team Newsletter August 2020

Welcome to the 2nd monthly newsletter! The aim is to provide you with a monthly guide to events and news relevant to research software development, including content from outside our team.

If you’d like the newsletter delivered to your inbox for maximum convenience, please sign up to our Google Group.

Events

With many taking annual leave during August, events this month are limited. We hope to see more in September!

• NAG are running 5 free masterclasses on algorithmic differentiation. Between July 30th and August 27th, the first has already passed but you can still register for the remaining classes.
• Carpentry Con@Home continues to run all through August, this free online conference has a variety of events covering; git, co-development, avoiding burnout and much more!
• LunchBytes: Writing safer Python code - September 9th 2020 12:00-13:00 (More details below)
• Gaussian Process Summer School: Learn about Gaussian Processes with experts from the University of Sheffield and beyond - September 14th 2020 to September 17th 2020

Lunchbytes

A new monthly series of short talks on research computing, data workflows, and infrastructure. The first session is to be on 9th September 2020 12:00-13:00 and is themed around writing safer Python code:

• Type Annotations - how to reduce the risk of passing the wrong type of argument to functions (Joe Heffer, IT Services)
• Automatable testing of code using pytest (David Jones, RSE team)
• Writing safer functions that are easier to reason about (Will Furnass, RSE team)

Each talk will be ~10 minutes, leaving half an hour for discussion/questions.

You’ll notice that all presenters are from IT Services or the RSE team; in future we hope that people from the research community feel able to either request LunchBytes talks from others or offer LunchBytes talks on topics they find interesting. We’ll tell you more about the mechanisms for making requests / offering talks at the first meetup!

Sign up to our mailing list to be notified of Blackboard Collaborate joining instructions!

Opportunities

• EPSRC Research Software Engineer (RSE) Fellowships August 18th 2020 deadline
• EPSRC Call for Access to High Performance Computing (HPC) September 4th 2020 deadline.
• A new initiative SORSE was launched in July, with the intent to deliver weekly online content for RSEs to develop skills and collaborate. Abstracts for proposed events can be submitted here. We can expect to see them begin to schedule events at the end of summer, their programme already lists several upcoming topics:
  • Configuring Sphinx from scratch: making your own documentation
  • Help! I’m a Research Software Manager!
  • Towards an NLP Pipeline for Conflict Narrative Detection
  • and more…
• UKRI Coronavirus Hub - Collaborations between RSEs and academics can be very productive ways of developing epidemiological models.

Web and Blogs

• A retrospective look at the N8 ReproHack that took place in May. This research reproducibility event was moved online due to the pandemic, enabling participants outside the UK to join.

• Anna Krystalli from our team recently delivered a keynote to the useR! conference, the main annual meeting of the R community. (Video

  Slides)

• Tom Stafford, a lecturer in Psychology and Cognitive Science and research practice lead, has put together a showcase of the data visualisations produced by his students.

Training Resources

• IT Services: Research provides training in a range of research software related areas.
• The Library’s Scholarly Communications Team provides training and support for data management planning.
• Keen to learn R from the comfort of your home? Online R training from the Sheffield Bioinformatics Core may be the answer!
• Twin Karmakharm from the RSE team has put together a list of online training resources, mainly around Python and git.

If you think there are other great training resources we should advertise, please get in contact.

Sheffield RSE Team Services

The RSE team aims to collaborate with you to help improve your research software. We can provide dedicated staff to ensure that you can deliver excellent research software engineering on your research projects.

The RSE team provides free Code clinics and paid services allowing us to collaborate longer term.