URSSI Blog

Making Open Source Research Software Visible: A Path to Better Sustainability?

Neil Chue Hong • September 12, 2019

Why do open source research software projects appear to have a low rate of success? Is it because we lack appropriate models for sustaining research software development or is it because the community isn’t seeing the results?

In “traditional” open source software projects, development is often sustained by creating a community of contributors from different organisations that collectively provide effort towards the ongoing maintenance and feature development of the software. For open source research software, although there are examples of the same model being used, it appears to have a smaller chance of success. In this blog post, I’ll examine my hypothesis that this is due to the differing competing drivers for contributing to software, particularly in academic settings, and also suggest some models that might improve the contributions.

Growth of the US-RSE Association

Ian Cosden and Sandra Gesing • September 10, 2019

Research Software Engineers are playing an increasingly critical role in research software development (as described in a previous blog post). A community of RSEs began to form in the UK in 2012, by Jan 2019, the European Commission had published a report Recognising the Importance of Software in Research - Research Software Engineers (RSEs), a UK Example emphasizing that RSEs are crucial to sustain research software and research computing. In the US, the people in these roles have begun to build a more formal community with the US Research Software Engineer Association (US-RSE). The first half of 2019 brought a rapid growth in both community involvement and activities surrounding the US-RSE Association, and the second half looks to promise more of the same.

Leading a Scientific Software Project: It's All Personal

Wolfgang Bangerth • August 7, 2019

(reposted from Better Scientific Software)

I’ve been participating in open source software projects since around 1994; and when asked what I’ve learned, I always say, “It’s all about people.” So while I could be writing about all the technical things that are going on in my scientific software projects, let me instead write about people.

Emacs’s CC mode

My first involvement with open source was when I was a freshman at the University of Stuttgart, in Germany, in 1994. I got an account on one of the computer pools. Most students didn’t back then, and probably also didn’t want to deal with the IBM version of Unix (AIX) that the machines were running, but I enjoyed the challenge and did some software development for fun on these machines. I used emacs (that time’s Integrated Development Environment) for C++ programming and became annoyed that the code indenter got lots of things wrong. Now, C++ is a difficult language to parse, but the regular expressions used to identify what is what just weren’t very good either. So I dug into the source code of CC Mode, the emacs mode for C++. Emacs packages are programmed in Lisp, which I didn’t know, but I figured out improvements to the regular expressions and sent them to the person who was listed as the author of the file.

Applications Now Open for the URSSI Winter School in Research Software Engineering

Kyle Niemeyer, Jeffrey Carver, Karthik Ram • July 9, 2019

Do you develop software for your research? Do you have some basic skills but desire more? If so, you might be interested in the URSSI Winter School in Research Software Engineering. As part of the URSSI institute planning, we are planning a pilot 2.5-day workshop on research software engineering skills. This is aimed at early-career researchers, including graduate students and postdocs, who are familiar with the basics such as the Unix shell, version control with Git, and Python programming, and would like to learn more about best-practices for developing research software.