#rsecon24 — Public Fediverse posts

Couldn't make #RSECon24? Miss a session due to a clash? Now you can catch up on all the action as the videos are online! 🎉

And in case you missed it the dates are announced for RSECon25 9-11th September 2025, keep an eye on https://rsecon25.society-rse.org
Playlist : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55OGsSapQUI&list=PL27mQJy8eDHkMVbt_ecskGUUl-tEqO3JS

Highlights Reel : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cd1EUJQ90w

#rse #rsecon25 #rsecon24

Here's the YouTube playlist with all the available talks from the 2024 Society of Research Software Engineering Conference.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL27mQJy8eDHkMVbt_ecskGUUl-tEqO3JS

#rsecon24 #researchsoftware

The title for the talk was originally "SQLite for Scientists", but I changed it when it became obvious that there were people many other fields working in research software engineering.

This toot thread includes links to the slides and some discussion around the talk at the time.

https://fosstodon.org/@volcan01010/113091381546455938

#rsecon24
#researchsoftware

SQLite for Everyone!

My talk from the 2024 Research Software Engineering conference is up on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/7JHhII6ZKz0

It's a 25-minute intro to the benefits relational databases and #SQL. The target audience is "past me", from when I was working with data as a research scientist and learning #python.

It includes a tour of useful tools including #sqlitebrowser, @qgis, @datasette and #etlhelper.

#rsecon24 #researchsoftware #sqlite #gis

I have written up my #EmergingVoices plenary talk from @ResearchSoftEng #RSECon24 as a blog post for those who want to review my ideas around #Research in #RSE, the importance of communities, and my thoughts around #publication with software that I hope to explore with my 2025 @SoftwareSaved fellowship. Also includes a short section on my "backstory".

https://jackatkinson.net/post/rsecon24/

Thoughts and comments welcomed.

#researchsoftware

In fact our talk about "Reproducible environments is all you need" during #rsecon24 is on youtube. If you're interested how to make your project more reproducible and easier to participate for others, check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX90-ZoJ_T8

You can also find the presentation here:

https://zenodo.org/records/14290309

I already did some PRs to other projects including a `devbox.json` - it's really useful to have the "correct" version of all those developer tools.

#devbox #development

In our latest blog post, the organisers of the "Weather and Climate Birds of a Feather Session" present a retrospective on the event, which took place during #RSECon24.

https://society-rse.org/weather-and-climate-rsecon24-birds-of-a-feather-session-retrospective-blog-post/

A belated congratulations to Aleksandra Nenadic, who was recognised for her outstanding contributions to Teaching and Education in the Research Software Engineering community at #RSECon24 last month. Aleks is one of our Instructor Trainers and Lesson Developer Trainers, and has been a leading member of the UK Carpentries community for many years. 👏 🎉

Well done, Aleks, and thank you for all that you do for The Carpentries community! 🙏

Image credit: picturesbybish (https://www.picturesbybish.com/)

This is the UK Government "Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework" for Software Developer.

It is an attempt to define expectations for staff in different IT jobs and compares the same role at Junior, Senior, Lead levels.

https://ddat-capability-framework.service.gov.uk/role/software-developer

They have Data Engineer, Data Scientist and others, too.

Following up on #RSECon24. #SoftwareEngineering #DataScience #dataengineering

Another donation received to our Participation and Inclusion fund on the final day of #RSECon24. Thank you to

🌟 Nicholas Macey

and all the donors whose generous contributions have helped support bursaries for those who could not otherwise attend the conference 🙌

If you'd like to help us provide this support for #RSECon25, you can donate to our Participation and Inclusion fund at anytime throughout the year at https://society-rse.org/donate. You can read more about the fund at https://rsecon24.society-rse.org/sponsors/participation-and-inclusion-fund/

Here are four of the Cambridge RSE team presenting at the #HPC #RSE and #Weather&Climate #RSE Birds of a Feather sessions at #RSECon24 last week. It was fantastic to see so many of our colleagues participating in discussions about the future of research software engineering.

🧵 #RSECon24 highlights:

6. Contributing to the planning for an RSE Competencies Toolkit (https://github.com/RSEToolkit/rse-competencies-toolkit) during their workshop.

7. Learning more about the different backgrounds and approaches of RSEs and RSE teams through the Emerging Voices talks and other events.

4/4

🧵 #RSECon24 highlights:

4. Expanding my knowledge of #Python through talks on mutation testing, performant code, templates, and more (and also finding UCL ARC’s great guide on Python tooling: https://github-pages.arc.ucl.ac.uk/python-tooling/).

5. Meeting other RSEs interested in developing software as a medical device and making a plan for sharing knowledge and experiences.

3/n

🧵 #RSECon24 highlights:

2. Learning about https://airqualitystripes.info/ and discussing #DataViz in RSE projects

3. Meeting members of the RSE #RStats community, learning about the R development process and tools like {reprex}, working on a >20 year old (!) issue, and picking everyone’s brains about software engineering best practices in R.

2/n

🧵 I attended my first #RSE conference (#RSECon24) this past week! A few highlights:

1. Having the opportunity to present some of our team’s work on requirements capture (slides: https://www.gmschroeder.com/software/rsecon24-requirements/). (Shown here sneaking in one of my favourite data visualisations - one of cartographer Harold Fisk’s maps of the evolution of the Mississippi River - as an analogy for complex, evolving research projects).

1/n

Another year, another RSECon. It was great to bring this amazing conference back to the Toon. I got to talk about a project close to my heart, discuss the future of the Society and the RSE movement, and my trustee duties included announcing the host of RSECon25. I will be sleeping for the next few days, but I look forward to catching up with this amazing community again next year at the University of Warwick! #RSECon24

https://www.instagram.com/p/C_lK-o3IS3O/?igsh=eXpia3htbTZ0YXl5

For those interested in #json with #sqlite, here's a link to the docs.

I use it to store arrays of items with multiple nested attributes. I don't use the items elsewhere, so it isn't worth the extra effort to define normalised tables.

It's not a free-for-all, however, as I create the items as #Python #pydantic models and use `item.model_dump_json()` to get the JSON string to insert.

The SQLite `for_each` function iterates and retrieves the attributes.

https://sqlite.org/json1.html#jeach

#rsecon24 3/2!

@JamesDoesData Welcome to Mastodon. For geeky stuff about coding, I now find it nearly as useful as Twitter was in the good old days. It's not nearly as popular for geoscience (yet).

For Datasette, Django and an optimistic (but realistic) developer perspective on LLMs, I recommended following @simon.

#RSECon24

There is a bonus video beyond the final slide. I decided there wasn't time to include it in the final presentation.

It gives an overview of using #QGIS form widgets to set up a form with constraints, drop-downs, defaults and date pickers.

QGIS really is a nice way to make a simple data-entry front-end for any database tables.

You can watch it here.

https://volcan01010.github.io/RSECon24/images/qgis_widgets_h264.mp4

#gis #rsecon24 2/2

Here are the slides for my #rsecon24 talk yesterday.

SQLite for Everyone.

It is an intro to SQL, plus a tour of useful tools including the `sqlitebrowser` GUI front-end.

If you start the presentation on a laptop/desktop and press 's', you can get the speaker mode. This has full notes so you can see what I said.

https://github.com/volcan01010/RSECon24

The `data` folder contains CSV and Python files to recreate the database and try the queries for yourself.

1/n

#sqlite #sql #python

Zoom zooming home from #rsecon24

Results of @EPCC’s parallel profiling of @ResearchSoftEng’s #RSECon24 attendees: we are an Amdahl’s law-abiding bunch