Applications now open for the 2024 URSSI Summer School in Research Software Engineering

Kyle Niemeyer, Lorena Barba

February 29, 2024

Do you develop software for your research? Do you have some basic skills but desire more?

If so, you might be interested in the upcoming URSSI Summer School in Research Software Engineering. Building off our pilot workshop in December 2019 and a recent winter school held in January 2024, we are hosting a three-day workshop on research software engineering skills over 24–26 June 2024 in Washington, DC, on the campus of George Washington University. The GWU Open Source Program Office is co-hosting the event with URSSI.

This is aimed at early-career researchers, particularly graduate students and postdocs, who are familiar with basic skills such as interacting with the Unix shell, version control using Git, and Python programming, and would like to learn more about best practices for developing research software.

Target Audience

The ideal candidate to attend this Summer School is a graduate student or postdoc who understands the basics of programming and version control but wants to learn more about software development practices. To get the most benefit from this workshop, we expect students to be familiar with the Unix shell, Python, and Git at the level taught at a Software Carpentry workshop.

Format and topics

This three-day, hands-on workshop will expose participants to a series of topics necessary for developing sustainable research software. Topics to be covered include:

  • Software design and modularity
  • Collaborative software development via GitHub
  • Software testing in Python
  • Peer code review
  • Packaging and distributing Python software
  • Documentation
  • Licensing
  • Reproducibility
  • Open science pratices, including software citation

The school will consist of lectures on these topics along with open hacking time to allow participants to practice the concepts covered in the lectures. To facilitate the hands-on experience, each participant will bring a project to work on throughout the course for applying these concepts.

Logistics

Important Dates