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title: RSECon take home points

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# RSECon take home points

## Technical
- Performant Python
    - To deliver for other and for ourselves
- [RO-Crate](https://www.researchobject.org/ro-crate/) make data from our work more reusable

## Team documentation / processes
- Agile from Manchester

## Training
- Performant Python
- Research 101
    - How to descibe responsibility of an RSE to an industry SE?
        - Flexibility, switch tech stacks frequently, working with all parts
- Green RSE
- Code Refinery
    - Look out for next training and host a local session

## Institutional-level

- Warwick promotion pathways
- Types of contract - Glasgow
- Apprentices / experience programme
    - IT apprentices
    - MSc students, PhD students

## Admin

- Expense claims
    - Need to check with Shane what policy is on expense claims for food

## Events

- Invited to go and talk at Turing Tech Talks series
    - Maybe about being a new group finding ways of working

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## RSE Leaders

- Warwick has a promotion pathway for RTPs which has technical and managerial forks
- Durham hosted T-Level students for 5 days who had been working with IT
    - Could do similar for IT apprentices
- Ask US-RSE and SocRSE for LoS for Circle-U bid and maybe some matched funding?
- Conference committee role focussed on documentation to make process more sustainable
- Define types of collaboration
    - e.g. as Expert, Safe Pair of Hands, true research collaboration
- Storytelling is important way to bring people along with us

## Performant Python Patterns: small changes to speed up your Python code

- Profiling & Optimisation in Python course: https://rse.shef.ac.uk/pando-python/

## RSE Research

- Go and talk to the Software Engineering Research people

## First 100 days of RSE group

- Team charter / mission statement

## Research software templates

- [Talk on Tue @2.15pm](https://app.canapii.com/e/rsecon24/playlist/playlist-26557362-3ff8-495d-bbe3-bd44c1859d6f/session/session-c6ba6816-c009-408c-ac84-680cb420a7fb)
- Should we create one? 
    - [Imperial](https://github.com/ImperialCollegeLondon/python-template?tab=readme-ov-file) has a python project template: 
    - [UCL ARC too](https://github.com/UCL-ARC/python-tooling)
- Or use the "[one template to rule them all](https://github.com/NLeSC/python-template)" being developed by the speaker and others? 
- Most existing templates designed for Python
    - Would need to make something more general

## Posters

- Imperial HPC and RSE Experience Programme
  - Work with RSEs for six months to learn what it's about
  -
- Everse.software has classifications for research software and a quality toolkit
  - Giacomo Peru
- ROCrate
  - Distribute metadata with research output data

## Breaktime chats

- If interested in running something similar to Turing/UCL's Research Software Engineering with Python course, chat to Martin O'Reilly about collaborating on lesson material updates and potentially running editions of the course together. Also maybe hackdays to expand on topics.
- [CodeRefinery](https://coderefinery.org/lessons/) has a different style of running workshops, a bit more advanced topics than Carpentries -> may be interesting for intermediate workshops. (See talk by Samantha Wittke, Tue 2pm)
    - Virtual workshops - someone presents remotely, have in-person helpers
    - e.g. Open Source, Automated Testing

## Open Science Cloud Infrastructure

- JupyterBook looks an interesting tool for shared docs
  - Also by the Turing Way

## Emerging voices

- Debs planning to work on a Research 101 course to introduce people to research
  - Interested in contributing - https://npdebs.github.io/Pre-seeds-Program/
- How to further bring together embedded RSEs from across KCL
  - Share the expereience from the central team for RSEs who are the only one in their group
- Working on tooling to more closely link papers with code

## Sponsor lightning talks

- EPCC eCSE funding call to do work on GPU acceleration of existing code
- SSI
  - Hidden REF nominations closing 13th Sept
    - Nominate Madalyn?
  - Next Research Software Camp is focussed on technicians
- GitHub
  - Talk to them about licensing for CoPilot
      - They don't really worry about what you do with the Student Pack - have plenty of people using it to work on early-stage startups

## Agile (Manchester and Turing)

- Scrum as used by Manchester sounds very practical for RSE work
  - Propose using within our team
- Split weekly group meeting into a weekly standup and a 'the other stuff' meeting
- Should give pair programming a go at least as an onboarding tool
    - [name=Louise] I really like pair programming, would be happy to do it more regularly if anyone is keen
- King's has Agile training available via Skillsforge: https://emckclac.sharepoint.com/sites/ITace/SitePages/training.aspx

## Lunchtime chats
- GitHub runners are surprisingly good, try fully compiling CemrgApp on them before trying prebuilt option. Also compiling with release mode is still useful for answering "does it compile"  quickly before doing tests with debug mode.

## Devbox

- Sounds like a really useful tool for managing local environments on dev machine
  - Like asdf + npm

## Automated software quality indicators - Hermes

- Read the Helmholtz vision paper
- About the indicators that funders may be interested in
  - FAIR, different maturity levels
- Hermes automates harvesting, collation, publishing of software metadata

## OSPO

- Supports everything Open Source within org
    - Monitor, training, governance
    - https://github.com/todogroup/ospodefinition.org
- Push an OSPO at KCL
    - OSPO++ helped UCL
    - OSS London Breakfast Club

## Random chats

Turing Institute has a weekly tech talk series and invited us to come talk about something - maybe related to setting up a new group, choosing ways of working, or related? (contact: Kat Goldman)

## Green RSE

- Green Algorithms Project - https://www.green-algorithms.org/
    - Can we install this on the CREATE HPC? :D https://www.green-algorithms.org/GA4HPC/
  - Someone from KCL listed in acks https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/gabrielle-samuel
- Laura @ Franklin has some HPC/cloud software worth investigating
    - DisTraX - ephemeral filesystem in distributed RAM to avoid disk thrashing
    - FlowCron - HPC workflow which handles data transfer (not yet public)
- Andy presented on energy use on Archer2 - analysed every Slurm job
    - Harder if you:
        - Have people running jobs without `srun`
        - Don't have vendor supported energy consumption reporting (Cray do)
        - Let jobs share a node
    - Best bet is to calculate average power for each node(type)
        - Then use Xalt2 to get data on executables people are running
    - Andy is happy to have a call / meet at HPC-SIG to talk with infra team about what they've been doing
- Training
    - Linux Foundation has some on climate aware computing relevant for RSEs
    - They're (the speaker this morning) currently working on training we could deliver to researchers
        - Very general, not too technical - then would lead to the RSE-specific training if they wanted more
        - Colin Sauze also delivered a brief one at CW https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWoRartHwgA
    - Could embed green computing principles in all training - add brief discussion in SWC / HPC training


## Other non-session topics
- We should book hotels earlier next time, being half an hour away from the venue wasn't particularly convenient given how early/late the sessions and socials were
- Is there anything we as a team can do to make our experiences at the conference better? Also, what worked well?
    - I like the idea of this HackMD! It's useful to have key links and points from sessions I wasn't able to attend.