The first German national RSE conference took place in Potsdam on 4th-6th June 2019 with 187 attendees. deRSE19 was a really vibrant, welcoming and well-organised event in a great location and had a diverse agenda, encouraging participants from across Europe to share experiences of software engineering in research.
In terms of presentations Imperial College was the best-represented institution from outside Germany, with the following speakers:
- Jeremy Cohen (EPSRC RSE Fellow, Department of Computing) who presented a talk on building research software communities and a poster about RSLondon.
- Alex Hill (Senior Web Application Developer, Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology) who spoke about the challenges of conducting constructive code reviews, particularly in a research setting.
- Mark Woodbridge (RSE Team Lead, Research Computing Service) who gave a talk on RSE 2.0, reflecting on progress in Research Software Engineering and how it may develop in the near future.
Many thanks to all the event organisers and sponsors for giving us the opportunity to present.
Also during the conference a keynote on RSE collaboration was delivered by Alys Brett, chair of the newly established Society of Research Software Engineering and head of the Software Engineering Group at the UKAEA. UK RSEs also attended deRSE19 from the Software Sustainability Institute, the University of Westminster, and the University of Southampton. We look forward to reuniting with them, as well as colleagues from Germany and beyond at UKRSE19 in September!