November 2021 Newsletter

University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering Team Newsletter November 2021

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the monthly newsletter from the Research Software Engineering Team at The University of Sheffield.

Opportunities

• Research Software Engineer. Come and join us! This is an open-ended position at the University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering team. The role is ideal for someone with a passion for research and for good software engineering looking to use their skills in collaborative software development and reproducible research to make an impact on research projects across the whole of the University of Sheffield and beyond. Closing date 6th December 2021.
• UKRI: Support the development of research software engineering. Funding from the UKRI is available for activities to support the development of research software engineering in the UK. The closing Date is 2nd of Dec 2021 You must be either:
  • a researcher or research software engineer at an eligible research organisation
  • an employee of an eligible public sector research establishment.
• REDCap System Administrator. System Administrator position within the Clinical Infection Research Group (CIRG) at the University of Sheffield, working on the REDCap project which has been supported by our RSE team. Closing date 19th November 2021.

LunchBytes

We have our December edition of LunchBytes coming up very soon, which will be discussing parallelisation!

• LunchBytes: Parallelisation: an easy trick to speed up your code? 13th January 2022 12:00-13:00 Parallelisation - running multiple pieces of work at the same time - can be a great way to speed up research code, but requires an appreciation of the costs introduced by distributing work concurrently over computational assets. This session will be made up of short talks introducing both fundamental concepts needed for successful use of parallelisation, and state of the art technologies available for researchers.

  More details about the event are available on our website.

News

• RSdropinUK: An exciting new service of free Research software technical drop-in sessions for researchers and Research Software Engineers based at organisations in the UK has been launched by members of the RSE community! Each fornightly drop-in session will also include an informal tutorial/walkthrough of a research software engineering tool, aimed at absolute beginners. Check out their website for details of the types of problems they can help with and information on how to join the sessions. And don’t forget, your friendly local Sheffield RSE team, in collaboration with IT Services, also offer similar code clinic sessions.
• ReproHack Hub Launch: Join the ReproHack Core Team, in collaboration with the N8 CIR on the 18th November 2021 in the inaugural event using their brand sparkling new ReproHack Hub! ReproHack events are sandbox environments for practicing research reproducibility where participants attempt to reproduce published research of their choice from a list of proposed papers with publicly available associated code and data. There are two ways to get involved:
  • As an author: Submit your paper for reproduction and review!
  • As a participant: Join on us on this celebratory day and get practical experience in reproducibility with real published materials!
• GitHub Citation Files: GitHub have introduced support for citation files. These are simple to use and ensure users of your work can easily cite it correctly!
• N8CIR High Performance Community Event: An in-person event on the 13th of December to celebrate the work of the N8 CIR over the last 12 months, including keynotes, presentations and lightning talks. Both Anna Krystalli and Paul Richmond of RSE Sheffield will be presenting lightning talks at this event!
  • Visit the n8cir.org.uk website for more information and to register for the event.

Selected Articles

This is a small selection of recent articles from the Software Sustainability Institute which may be of interest!

• Don’t be afraid - anyone can learn to code
• Using Python to double check your work
• 5 Popular Myths of Learning to Code

Training

• Matlab Academy is an online resource for learning MATLAB for free with MATLAB Onramp and accessing interactive self-paced online courses and tutorials on Deep Learning, Machine Learning and more: https://matlabacademy.mathworks.com/. As an example, a new course on Matlab academy demonstrates how to simulate electronic circuits.
• Performance analysis methodology workshop | 15 Dec 2021 09:00-12:00. This workshop aims to give a solid understanding of the basics of performance analysis for research and simulation codes, using high- and low-level metrics. https://www.dur.ac.uk/arc/training/workshop/

• Git & GitHub through GitKraken - from Zero to Hero!

  9th Dec 2021, 1st Feb 2022, 5th April 2022 10:00-16:30. An introductory course delivered by the Sheffield RSE team, teaching the git and GitHub skills required to manage research code over it’s development lifecycle. These skills are essential for collaborative research teams. Please note that we have very high demand for these events so they may fill up very quickly, but please still register your interest so we can gauge demand and provide an appropriate number of sessions!

RSE Sheffield

The RSE Sheffield 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 Sheffield team provides free Code Clinics (in collaboration with IT Services), plus paid services that allow us to collaborate longer term.