I recently spoke with Jay Lofstead about the challenges of starting a career in HPC, and this morning listened to a panel on “Emerging Talent in HPC.” I found the panel was missing a valuable perspective, and wanted to make a quick recording of that perspective. This isn’t an official Developer Stories episode, but rather some associated ramblings …

Jay Lofstead is a Principal Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories, with extensive experience in storage technologies, High Performance Computing, and reproducibile practices. In this episode, we talk about the challenges of navigating the graduate school and career space, because the decisions you make can be very strategic,…

Today on Developer Stories I talk with Felix LeClair, an open source developer and BLAS Floating-point guru that works at Environment and Climate Change Canada. Felix is someone to watch - I have never met someone with as much passion about hardware and chip design as him. In this episode, we talk briefly about the history of HPC Social, the growin…

I’m thrilled to be interviewing Alan Sill, Managing Director, of the High Performance Computing Center at Texas Tech University, President of the Open Grid Forum, Co-Director of the National Science Foundation Cloud and Autonomic Computing Center, and my co-founder for HPC Social. Alan is someone that I could sit down with and listen to stories for…

Today we talk to Ramiro Berrelleza, Founder and CEO of Okteto about his story of falling in love with computers as a kid, and pursuring a non-traditional path that has led him from industry to consulting to leading companies. We have a lot of fun talking about web technologies, and our shared experiences. This episode is full of great stories that …

Happy New Year listeners! We are kicking off 2024 with an episode on package management and snakes, but not just any package manager - we chat with Wolf Vollprecht, Founder & CEO of prefix.dev, who has been involved in projects ranging from conda (and conda-forge) to mamba and other QuantStack projects. If you haven’t tried out their package manage…

It’s a joy to introduce my colleague and friend, Claudia Misale, a Researcher at the IBM Watson Research Center. Claudia has a background in distributed computing and programming, and got her PhD Informatics from the Università degli Studi di Torino in Italy. In this episode, we first go back to the Middle Age of computing (when there were floppy d…

In this 91st episode we talk with the benevolent dictator and creator of Snakemake Johannes Köster, who not only continues to be a leader in the bioinformatics community for software, but also is Group leader in Computer Science and Bioinformatics at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, and is the founder of BioConda and several well-known Ru…

Is there anything more scary than being a developer? 😱️ It’s a joy to write and share the Halloween special episode each year, and this year we take an adventure into a futuristic city, where corruption has overtaken and even science does not have a voice. We follow our protagonists through a dangerous city, battling night creatures and enjoying sm…

For this 89th episode we are shifting from Life Sciences consulting to BioSciences software and workflows! I’m so excited this week to introduce you to Paolo Di Tommaso - the creator of the Nextflow workflow software, and CTO and Co-founder of Seqera Labs. Do you know how Nextflow came to be? Or why it’s in Groovy? Or what cool work Seqera labs is …

This is our third (and final) interview for the Life Sciences Consulting mini-series, and we are finishing with a bang! Today we talk to Reema Baskar, Postdoctoral researcher at the Genome Institute of Singapore. Reema is studying Systems Epigenetics and Immunology, with an intention to explore the business side. We talk about the process of learni…

Today we invite Eric Haas on the show - our second guest in the Life Sciences Consulting mini-series. Eric got his BS in Biology from Davidson College, and has taken his journey from there to being founder and CEO of Ionic Cytometry Solutions. In this episode we talk about football, flow cytometry, and Eric’s journey from learning about a technolog…

In this second episode, Tyler has graduated, and tells the story from when he first started dipping his toes into Life Sciences Consulting to where he is today. If you think this is a trivial matter of changing an office, think again! Tyler moved from California to Germany, faced a new culture and the challenge of forming new routines and relations…

This episode kicks off the first in our Life Sciences consulting mini-series. We interview Tyler Burns, CEO and Founder at Burns Life Sciences Consulting. Tyler and I go way back to graduate school, and it was an amazing opportunity to hear his story about learning, life, and a discovery for a love of programming and solving interesting problems. P…

Sara El-Gebali is a Research Data Manager at SciLifeLab, and has traveled across country lines in her work as a scientist and data manager. Along with sharing her journey today, Sara is passionate about advocacy for equity and inclusion of individuals from marginalized groups in STEM fields. We talk about the journey that one might take through an …

Today’s episode is not just a story - but an adventure! We chat with self-proclaimed “Container Tinkerer” Christian Kniep, who has gone from a small village in Germany to an industry expert in containers. In this story we hear about life hacks in the Germany army, traveling and being a teacher, making ugly websites (below), and landing some impress…

In this episode, I interview Informatics Honors Students from Stellenbosch University, including Megan Stock, Nina and Renee Roux, and their fearless mentor Kim Martin about their work to create organization and structurearound the space of research software engineering work and roles. We don’t just talk about these strangethings called ontologies,…

Brandon Mitchell is a DevOps Solutions Architect at Boxboat (an IBM company), and can help you across the stack from shell scripting up to cloud orchestration and container security. This is an especially exciting episode because we talk about bleeding edge, and relatively uncharted territory - container security. Yes, there are companies out there…

We often talk about wearing many hats. But as experts in software engineering, high performance computing,or scientific domains, those hats are sometimes scoped to a particular community. We might wear a baseballhat and switch to a different team, but we won’t throw away the baseball hat entirely in favor of a top hat. To do this kind of hat trick,…

Dr. James Cuff is the new inagural Executive Director of the MIT Office of Research Computing and Data (ORCD),and he brings a rich history of leadership in the high performance computing that he’s excited to share!How does one pursue this path? There is a lot of stumbling, making mistakes, radical candor, and learning about yourselfand people. In t…

In tech, we all can tell a horror story. It’s when you accidentally ran a command,didn’t back something up (and lost it), or scream had your Zoom audio on whenyou were singing to Avril Lavigne (anyone else?) So this week, and for the firstinagual episode of the newly rebranded “Developer Stories” we are sharing some ofthese horror stories in this H…

For this episode of RSE Stories we are joined by Fernanda Foertter, Director at Voltron Data and experienced HPC practitioner. You may know her on Twitter as @hpcprogrammer, or for her significant contributions at earlier roles at Nvidia or Oak Ridge National Lab, but have you heard her origin story, and how she got involved in this work? In this e…

Last time in the SC22 Mini-series, we learned about the Early Career Program (ECP)from its chair, Marina Kraeva. Today we get a first-hand glimpse into what the program canoffer its attendees as we talk to six previous ECP participants. Our six guests in this episode are Sameh Abdulah, Jean Luca Bez, Silvina Caino-Lores,Hang Liu, Valeria Barra, and…

Ana Trisovic is a Research Associate at Harvard School of Public Health and a Sloan Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Effectively, she does data engineering for her research group and works on reproducible data and software dissemination. First, Ana speaks of her background, from her first job at Microsoft Development Center …

Marina Kraeva is a Senior Research Computing Systems Analyst at Iowa StateUniversity and this year’s Early Career Program Subcommittee Chair. In thisepisode, Marina tells us about the history of the Early Career Program (ECP) atSupercomputing, the overarching goals of ECP, and what potential participantscan expect to learn this year! She encourages…

What is the line between a biostatistician and a data scientist? And how does the work or impact differ betweenacademia and industry? Today on RSE Stories we talk to Daniel Sabanés Bové, a Senior Principal Data Scientist and Associate Director at Roche who graduated from the University of Zurich with a PhD in statistics. Not only does Daniel build …

Jay Lofstead is a member of technical staff at Sandia National Laboratoriesand this year’s Supercomputing 2022 (SC22) Inclusivity Committee Chair. In thisepisode, Jay tells us about his experiences volunteering with SC over the pastfew years, the history of the Inclusivity committee, and his plans forimplementing change to make Supercomputing 2022 …

Megan Phinney is a recent graduate of Iowa State University, and will starting a full time position at Los Alamos NationalLab after her graduation this month! In this episode, Megan tells us her story of stumbling on a national lab (hint, a funky pen is involved!)and her early experiences working as an intern at LANL, and how important a particular…

For the most part when I’ve been introduced to DEI groups and initiatives, they mean well but I’m left feeling a bit lost.I either don’t fully understand what I can do, or I don’t think the initiative itself fully grasps the depth of the issue.My view on DEI, “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” changed when I watched a talk by Rowland Mosbergen, a st…

Peter is a Senior Research Software Engineer at the University of College London, a role he joinedin late 2019 after a rich career in the private sector. In this 71st episode, Petertalks about his journey from Germany, to London, and what it’s been like to work in everything from medical imaging to working at Sony and reference manager Mendeley. Ho…

For our 70th episode we chat with Peter Vaillancourt, a Computational Scientist at the Cornell Center of Advanced Computing.Peter took a non-traditional path to his current role, starting in the Air Force and eventually studying math and physics, and eventuallyfinding his love for programming. In this episode, Peter talks about his journey to under…

Welcome to the New Year, my dearest reader! We open 2022 with our 69th episode,an interview with Chase Million, the CEO of Million Concepts, a researchand consulting company with expertise in planetary science, remote sensing, andastronomy. Chase presents us with a less commonly seen model for providingresearch software engineering services, and te…

Tim Haines is one of those people you would be lucky to have as a colleague.If you spend just a few minutes with Tim, you’ll quickly find yourself having fun. Why? Tim is easy to laugh, and unbelievably smart and so wanting to share this with you.In this episode of Research Software Engineer stories, Tim tells his extensive journeythrough academia …

Happy Halloween listeners! This is the third Halloween special episide of the Research Software Engineer Stories Podcast,and this year we have a story that you might relate to, and give you a spurt of magic. You see, this year weget a glipse of what it means to have an Open Source Halloween. What would it mean if candy were akin to software?To go a…

What happens when you mix hard work, curiosity, creativity, and a little luck?You hear an inspiring story like that of Alec Scott, a current Senior at the Universityof Arizona. In this episode of RSE Stories, Alec shares his story from discoveringa passion for working in the space of software and research, and finding research software engineering.…

Have you ever been lead for hundreds of people? Michael Heroux has!Mike is a Senior Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, and a Scientist in Residence at St. John’s University.In this episode of RSE Stories we talk about the Exascale Computing project, working together in-person and remotely,and some good practices for you and your teams to ta…

Robin Wilson has an impressive body of work, from creating a new method to monitor air pollution from satellitesat high spatial resolution, to writing scientific software and creating means for open data. He now is thrivingdoing freelance work, and has an important story to share with our RSE community. You see, Robinis in a wheelchair. It wasn’t s…

Research Software Engineering is so much more than supercomputers and scientific programming.In this episode of RSE Stories we meet Kalina Borkiewicz, a Research Software Engineer inthe Advanced Visualization lab that works on scientific visualization. We aren’t talking aboutplots and websites – Kalina works on award winning cinematic visualization…

Changing jobs and roles isn’t easy at the best of times. But with her infectious enthusiasm Kate Court made her way from research in arts and humanities to her role as research developer at Newcastle University. Being open minded about people from different backgrounds was essential as is realising that many of our skills are transferrable.I am par…

Have you ever wondered about the story of the host behind this podcast?Flipping the interview of the very first episodealmost two years ago, for this week’s episode special guest host Ian Cosden interviews Vanessa Sochat,a Computer Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National lab and founder of the RSE Stories podcast. Vanessa started as a researcher i…

For this episode I meet with Mark Abraham, who is an RSE at the EuroCC National Competence Centre Sweden. Some of our listeners may also know him in the context of Gromacs, short for GROningen MAchine for Chemical Simulations, the leading package for molecular dynamics (see their repo at gitlab).Mark started his RSE journey in Australia. He then mo…

Edd Salkield is a research software engineer in the UK, where he founded Dreaming Spires.In this episode, we talk about a different kind of future for RSE work to serve the diversedemands of digital research based on international collaboration of RSE consultants andfreelancers. After finishing his studies with a MSc in computer science from Oxford…

In this recording Frank takes us through the various stages - and challenges - that he and his RSE friends took to build the German RSE association.Like so many other RSEs, Frank Loeffler’s career began in science; physics to be precise. As such he worked in different research areas in and out of Germany. During a research assignment in the US (Lou…

Daniel Nüst is a research software engineer working on the project “OpeningReproducible Research” at the Institute for Geoinformatics, University ofMünster. In this episode, we talk about RSE career paths, reproducibleresearch, and computational workflows under peer review. After finding his dream discipline of geoinformatics as a student,Daniel Nü…

After starting his career as an engineer, Mark went to build and head a growing team of research software engineers at Newcastle University in the UK. The transition from engineer to manager can be quite daunting. In the industry, it has been the traditional career path for many engineers, with all the problems this career change can bring. But wit…

Ron is a software engineer at Argonne National Lab, and shares with us his storyabout realizing the potential for a good career by pursuing software engineering,and eventually finding his way from early career training to having a job at Argonne.Does Argonne have a representation of a research software engineer? How important arestudents and traini…

Now that research software engineering is an established role in some universities and countries it is easy to forget how difficult it was for engineers to work on research they love but really focus on the software development side rather than the academic research. In this interview Paul Richmond describes how he “masqueraded” as academic before …

Dan Katz is a Chief Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.But you might recoginize him from Better Scientific Software, The Software SustainabilityInstitute, or the Journal of Open Source Software. In this episode, we talk about software,citation and best practices, but we also talk about the community around it, and the …

Does your institution have an electronics shop? What goes on there, and is itresearch software engineering? In this episode, we talk with Blaise Thompson, an instrumental technologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Blaise shares with us the valueof building instruments for research, and that now is the time to rethink and revamp theseinst…

In late 2020 Alys Brett stepped down as president of the Society of Research Software Engineering in the UK. Coming from a physics background she moved into the world of research software engineering. That transition wasn’t always easy. But Alys helped to build and shape the RSE movement right from the start. In our conversation we look back over h…