Feedback & future ideas

[trallard]

Summary

Use this issue to share the following:

• Feedback on the unconference event
• Suggestions for:
  • future topics
  • future locations
  • other formats for events
  • any other recommendation to better serve the community

Who can help?

• Any community member

[cc-a]

Firstly thanks to @ggorman, @sgibson91 and @trallard for organising and help throughout.

Unconference format was great for us as we could bring our own project and work in the same room as the people with experience/expertise. Seemed like some people struggled at first to find something to do so maybe having something more structured planned for them might have been useful.

In terms of our experience using Azure there were maybe a few things that would have made things smoother for us.

• Changes to the CLI and Web UI made it slightly difficult to follow existing instructions and guides
• Resource limits on the subscriptions ultimately prevented us from running tests on the scale we would have liked to, but more than that it was difficult to establish what limits were in place on a particular subscription. Presumably this information is somewhere but we couldn't find it despite looking several times.
• Lack of an S3 api compatible storage option initially seemed like a bigger problem than it turned out to be in the end but we had to figure out a work around.

Future topics:

• I can't remember who mentioned it now but someone at the workshop suggested looking at using actions to execute analysis workflows
• Some initial steps were made towards running on different architectures and multi-node execution in the cloud but I'd be interested in exploring that further

[iamleeg]

Hi @trallard, @sgibson91, @ggorman, thanks for putting so much into the workshop! I was happy overall, there was a good range of skills and backgrounds, and interesting problems to solve. I made some good connections, and worked on fun challenges. Some specific feedback on the event:

• there was one project where it was hard to contribute because the work being done needed access to the project's cluster. We ended up all mobbing around one laptop, and I drifted away to a different project (more on that below!) because I didn't feel it was the most valuable way to get involved. Maybe if a group know they're going to pitch a project like that, there should be a way to show interest in advance and get set up, or we could encourage them to set up guest accounts so people can join in.
• more information radiators! Aside from the couple of standups each day, we didn't see what other projects were doing. If that were more visible, people could drop in on projects where they have relevant experience to share, or see an interesting problem being solved.
• I spoke to some folks who felt that they were in the wrong group but didn't know they could, or didn't feel comfortable, switch to a different group. I know it was said upfront but more encouragement of floating or changing at the standups would make it more dynamic.

For future events:

• I'd like to encourage some round table best practice discussions on things like CD. We have a lot of different perspectives and experiences which it'd be useful to share. Not as the whole event, but maybe as a getting-to-know-you at the beginning or a retro at the end.
• Documentation hacks! Technical writing is a different skill from academic writing and we need to supply good documentation for our code.
• I'd recommend the West Midlands for a future location, there are good facilities in places like Birmingham University and Aston which are accessible by well-connected train links. Otherwise, Manchester-way: the N8 universities are doing good RSE work, Daresbury is in the area too, and ARM's HPC group (the bit that isn't in Warwick) but I don't know what venues to recommend around there.