September 14, 2017 / by /

RSE 2017 in Manchester

SEPTEMBER 7-8, 2017 — MANCHESTER, UK — From September 7 to 8, 2017, the second Research Software Engineer conference was held at the Museum for Science and Industry in Manchester, UK. With over 200 attendees the conference was sold out. Julia Damerow attended the conference, presenting a poster about the Giles Ecosystem, a distributed system for text extraction and OCR of documents developed by the Digital Innovation Group.

The two-day conference was packed with interesting talks and workshops, focusing for example on the question if research software is different than software (answer: we still don’t know), the publication of marine data using a Linked Data approach, or how docker can be used in a continuous integration environment.

Also very interesting were the results of the last research software engineer (RSE) survey, which yielded among many other things that if you are an RSE then you are probably male (not very surprising) and most likely know how to program in Python (also not so surprising). The survey data along with the code to analyze it is available here.

Overall the conference was a great way to learn about the RSE community and ongoing projects and community efforts. We are looking for forward to next year’s conference!