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.
Essential Open Source Software for Science: Supporting the Computational Foundations of Biology
Dario Taraborelli, Jeremy Freeman, Nicholas Sofroniew • July 8, 2019
(reposted from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Science Medium)
Open source software is a key ingredient of modern science. Hundreds of software packages, libraries, and applications have become essential tools. Whether it’s searching a genome sequence for a disease gene, counting cells in a microscope image, or tracking the evolution of an Ebola outbreak, software is critical to the work scientists do every day — and much of it is built by researchers who volunteer their time and effort to make their tools available and usable by others. Despite its importance, the majority of open source software is undervalued and lacks funding for maintenance, growth, development, and community engagement — especially after its initial phase.
URSSI Conceptualization Survey Results
Jeffrey Carver • May 20, 2019
To better understand research software user and developer communities, we conducted a survey of research software users and developers. The focus of the survey was to gather information to help identify how to increase the sustainability of research software. To gather a broad range of perspectives, we distributed the survey to 25,000 NSF and 25,000 NIH PIs whose projects involve research software, as well as mailing lists of interested people such as the WSSSPE email list. In addition, we used snowballing by asking people to forward the survey to others who might be interested. This effort is part of the URSSI conceptualization project, which seeks to understand the diverse challenges and barriers that the research software community faces.
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