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rse-aunz / rse-au

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Profiles of RSEs in our community #59

Open rowlandm opened 5 years ago

rowlandm commented 5 years ago

Hi All,

This is part of our deliverables #51 so I thought I would add this in so that people could add in their own profile.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THESE WILL BE MADE PUBLIC. By adding them in your are OK with us making this public and using it in material in print, social media, on the website etc.

I'll start mine in the next comment.

[Update: I have no idea what the profiles will look like, so please use mine as a template but feel free to add your own questions and answers!]

[Update: Reminder that the rse skills that are most underestimated are training and sys admin]

rowlandm commented 5 years ago

Name: Rowland Mosbergen

Position Description: Facilitator - Petascale Campus Initative

Institution: University of Melbourne

Why do I consider myself an RSE?: Because I am a generalist and this was a category that came out in the workshop at eResearch Australasia 2018 . That means I can talk to researchers and talk to tech people, 'translate' what they are both saying, and also find solutions that hit the sweet spot. I also network widely so I can direct people to appropriate services both internal and external to the University.

What do I do that is most valued by the people I'm helping?: Joining the dots, providing a vision and highlighting potential redflags for new projects, and giving people a vocabulary to express their needs to service providers.

How many times have you been given short term contracts (less than 1 year) while working in research? My first 5 years were 1 year contracts. My last contract was 3 years. Now back onto a 1 year contract.

What is the nicest complient you have ever received when working as an RSE? You really are a translator - you have given me a vocabulary that I can use to express myself (in a technical sense).

What kind of tech/architecture do you use? Currently I am using Flask (Python web framework), Postgres on a Docker image I got from github for a prototype web application.

Previously I used Pyramid (Python web framework), Postgres, Apache, Ansible, Redis on the Nectar cloud for Stemformatics.

What tech would you like to learn next and why? I'm not really interested in learning a new technical skill at the moment. It's more driven by need. I really want to have an integrated document management system, CRM and project management system that is integrated with my University systems....

smoskwa commented 5 years ago

There are some interview/case studies on RSEs here https://rse.ac.uk/resources/case-studies-on-rse-careers/ which might give some ideas about how to write these and what to say

atruskie commented 5 years ago

Name: Anthony Truskinger

Position Description: Officially: Software Architect, but also has been Senior Research Assistant, Research Assistant. I often use Research Software Engineer in my social media.

Why do I consider myself an RSE? Because I'm a programmer with a PhD working on a research project. My role is partly academic (writing the occasional paper, supervising PhD students) but mostly technical (SysAdmin, Software Engineering, Data Science). My role is informal and grew naturally out of a need within our research group for continued investment into software; later on, I realised that I fit the definition of an RSE.

What do I do that is most valued by the people I'm helping? I do a lot of (what I'd loosely term as) consulting: I help users in our field use our tools to analyse their data. This analysis is usually directly helpful to other scientists and leads to published results. Seeing my work directly help someone is rewarding. Somewhat ironically, this work is not part of my PD but because it nets our research group publications it has been accepted as part of my role.

How many times have you been given short term contracts (less than 1 year) while working in research?

Since mid-2015:

What is the nicest compliment you have ever received when working as an RSE? A visualisation I built helped a scientist understand and view their data for the first time. They discovered multiple exciting things that day. "This is so cool" really stuck with me.

What kind of tech/architecture do you use? Windows, Linux, Docker, Singularity, Ruby (and Rails), AngularJS, D3, C#, F#, Python, PostgreSQL, Redis, Nectar/OpenStack, R (rarely)

What tech would you like to learn next and why?

I consent to this profile being shared publicly

LindsayBradford commented 5 years ago

Name: Lindsay Bradford

Position Description: Senior Software Engineer.

Why do I consider myself an RSE? I write industrial quality software for researchers. When their bespoke software aspirations outstrip what they can do via simple scripting/macros, I'm called in to see those aspirations met. I also supply technical help/guidance to people writing their own research code.

What do I do that is most valued by the people I'm helping? Time saving tools seem to be the thing that get the most favourable feedback. Re-implementing heavily computational algorithms to bring run-times from days down to minutes, or introducing automation for previously fully manual workflows to achieve similar time savings

How many times have you been given short term contracts (less than 1 year) while working in research?

I've lost track of my time as a research associate at QUT.

In my first five year stint with Griffith University, I asked HR at the end of it for a summary of contracts and extensions. Turns out I had a total of 13 over the period.

My current stint with Griffith university is a lot less dynamic, operating on a minimum of yearly contracts for the next 2 years.

What is the nicest compliment you have ever received when working as an RSE? The deputy head of our department, introducing me to a colleague of his as "our resident programming wizard".

What kind of tech/architecture do you use? Whatever seems a good fit for the job at hand. Windows and Linux architectures feature heavily. Languages used whilst an RSE have included various flavours of .NET, Perl, C, GoLang, and ObjectPascal. 3rd-party tools include: Access, Postgres, SQLServer, ArcGIS (writing plugins, using geodatabase tools in anger), Deep-end office macros (I once wrote a 6K LOC Excel macro for automating isotope analysis work), plus a host of less popular tools, often dictated by what's been used by others in the past.

What tech would you like to learn next and why?

A deeper exploration of concepts around Continuous Integration. Specifically, auto-deploy and/or testing via container technologies such as Docker.

dgrimreaper commented 5 years ago

Name: Daniel Grimwood

Position Description: Senior Supercomputing Specialist

Institution: Pawsey Supercomputing Centre

Why do I consider myself an RSE? I am not really a RSE anymore, but I was one and the fun part of my job is working with RSEs. I have experienced and can relate to a lot of the issues faced by RSEs. Quite a few of our team are RSEs. I started as a computational chemist, and wrote a distributed quantum chemistry package during my PhD. As a postdoc I quickly realised that being a RSE was not a reliable career path to support raising a family, and was lucky that a position opened at iVEC where I could continue using the same skills and doing similar work.

What do I do that is most valued by the people I'm helping? Managing supercomputer allocations at Pawsey, behind the scenes work to get funding for bigger machines, helping new users get started.

How many times have you been given short term contracts (less than 1 year) while working in research? Had lots that were 1 year, and some up to 3 years. Depended a lot on how my contract fitted in with 4- or 5-year funding cycles. Have been permanent for 2 years.

What is the nicest compliment you have ever received when working as an RSE? Being invited to give a talk on my PhD work at a prestigious conference was a huge compliment.

What kind of tech/architecture do you use? I prefer Fortran/MPI, want to do more of co-array Fortran. Also Fortran/OpenMP. Do scripting in Python and Perl. I also do Excel/VBA haha.

What tech would you like to learn next and why? CUDA. I’ve learned it but don’t use it enough for it to have sunk in.

jafaruddinlie commented 5 years ago

Name: Jafaruddin Lie

Position Description: Research DevOps Engineer

Institution: Monash University (Monash eResearch Centre)

Why do I consider myself an RSE?: This one is hard. I come from a more "traditional" system administration / devops background rather than research. In my current role, it doesn't feel like I am doing a lot in the research part, but I am enjoying talking and trying to understand what the researchers are trying to do and how I can help them.

What do I do that is most valued by the people I'm helping?: I can see the bigger picture of what needs to be done.

How many times have you been given short term contracts (less than 1 year) while working in research? This is my first foray into eResearch, and my current contract is not a short term contract.

What is the nicest complient you have ever received when working as an RSE? I am able to deal with different types of technology easily.

What kind of tech/architecture do you use? Currently: python, ansible, openstack Previously: network appliances such as Cisco switches, Jupiter boxes, Splunk (love this product!), Windows AD

What tech would you like to learn next and why? Kubernetes and more automation stuff. I like doing infrastructure and automation.

adamsteer commented 5 years ago

Name: Adam Steer

Position Description: Principal consultant / CEO of Spatialised

Institution: none. Self employed.

Why do I consider myself an RSE?: I build things in code to help researchers. I’m trained as a field scientist, and have a tonne of field/logistics experience - and once the data came in, I needed to learn to code; and code efficiently enough to churn millions of datapoints/pixels. I build concept proofs that work; and show how code can be used to make life easier. I more or less sit on the ‘code to make sense of data’ side, rather than the ‘optimise the things’ side

What do I do that is most valued by the people I'm helping? Work down the whole spectrum of interacting with clients to specifying what to code. From designing how to collect data all the way to delivering massive geospatial datasets using open standards. Also having a great field of view across geomatics practice; and the open source geospatial ecosystem is valued. This is really useful particularly in mentoring and training.

How many times have you been given short term contracts (less than 1 year) while working in research? lots.

What is the nicest compliment you have ever received when working as an RSE? that’s mind blowing! Probably others - it's actually often hard to hear compliments among the demands / stress / rejection notices.

What kind of tech/architecture do you use? Open source geospatial tools + Python: Rasterio/Fiona/Shapely/GDAL/PDAL. Have built a flask app, have built a PyWPS app to deliver on demand products from national-scale point clouds, have worked through massive raster indexing in geoserver/rasdaman. Ages ago pre-science I build web apps on LAMP stacks.

I can get by in Javascript, but frameworks do my head in. I am very much a prototyper / PoC builder / data munger / data exploiter.

I work on Linux and MacOS - bash is my friend, and I grew up doing command line cartography. I sometimes understand git, but use it every day.

What tech would you like to learn next and why? I want to revisiting the fundamental maths of geomatics and remote sensing with GPS and lasers and cameras - not new stuff, just understanding some of the fundamental underpinnings of my work a little better; assessing some applied machine learning ideas; and postGIS. These just help with tasks I can see in my future; and I need to track at least the hype cycle for business.

Having said that I don’t really want to go deeper into technology, since it ignores the strategic side of my life and experience; and ends up being a trap. I’m vastly better at assessing the landscape and designing what to code.

So, really? wooden boat building 😉, and going back to scanning things with lasers

softloud commented 5 years ago

Name:

Charles T. Gray

Position Description:

Why do I consider myself an RSE?:

In the six years or so I have had the opportunity to participate in research projects (undergrad research opportunities, now a phd student), the vast majority of my time has been spent on computational tasks. Frequently tasks where I feel that I am very inexpertly trying to reinvent a wheel I have not been trained to craft. I feel driven to look for tools to bridge this gap, if only to save my future self pain.

What do I do that is most valued by the people I'm helping?:

I think my biggest contributions so far have been in sharing my learning process with other people learning to code, through teaching, blogging, and twitter.

Although, :thinking: I co-authored and made a small contribution on two papers this year, and I used my software skills in both cases. In the first, I contributed to an ecology paper on the value of standardised data for systematic reviews. In another, I converted an equation to a function and packaged it for the r-savvy but not so mathematical psychologist primary authors. I feel my primary value is not so much my SE skills or mathematical, but so far my experiment in seeing what the combination of the two is proving to be most enjoyable.

How many times have you been given short term contracts (less than 1 year) while working in research?

:woman_shrugging: I've never known any other life than a precariat and I've had any number of casual roles from librarian to now reproducible data analysis RA.

What is the nicest compliment you have ever received when working as an RSE?

It's really fun working with you and now I feel really good about myself.

What kind of tech/architecture do you use?

I try to keep really firm boundaries on this. I wish to learn to be a good statistician, not a good computer scientist, but what I am interesting in using, I'm interested in learning about good practice. Data simulation is what I'm most interested in right now. I'm really interested in good enough practice in data science, R, tidyverse, packaged analysis, git, bash...

What tech would you like to learn next and why?

...and possibly julia and C eventually - so my simulations run faster.

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jonnyhtw commented 5 years ago

Happy for this to be shared publicly.

Name: Jonny Williams

Position Description: Climate Scientist

Institution: The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Science (NIWA), New Zealand

Why do I consider myself an RSE?: I work with meteorological software and spend the majority of my time doing coding of some kind. I come from a computational physics background and throughout my career I have moved increasingly away from applications to development.

What do I do that is most valued by the people I'm helping?: Getting configurations of climate models running for other people.

How many times have you been given short term contracts (less than 1 year) while working in research? None. I worked on contracts as a postdoc in the UK for 5 years, which was made up of a 2 year and a 3 year contract.

What is the nicest compliment you have ever received when working as an RSE? I can't think of anything specific but I enjoy sharing tools, tips and tricks which have made my life a lot easier. People are often impressed by how much using a good tool can increase their productivity, e.g. version control or Bash hacks!

What kind of tech/architecture do you use? Python, Fortran, HPC, Linux, BASH, git, svn.

What tech would you like to learn next and why? I really want to learn about containerisation (e.g. Docker and/or Singularity). This is something which is clearly gaining a lot of traction in the community at the moment and sounds very cool.

Edits at eResearch NZ 2020 at RSE BoF session

What is your educational background? Physics MSci - Imperial College London Physics PhD - The University of Bath

What do you do in your current role? See above.

How did you end up in this role? My PhD is in computational solid state physics and I applied for a climate modelling job at the UK Met Office afterwards thinking that I wouldn't even get an interview! I worked there for 2 years then at a private environmental research company called Eunomia Research and Consulting and then was a paleoclimate modelling postdoc at Bristol University for 5 years. Then I saw the job advert to move to NIWA and the rest is history!

What is one thing you love about your role and what is a challenge? I love learning about tools to help my streamline my workflow, e.g. tmux, Jupyter notebooks, vectorisation and so on.

A challenge is to keep abreast of the science behind the models that I maintain. I still get involved with scientific publications but less so than when I was a postdoc.

hot007 commented 5 years ago

Name: Claire Trenham

Position Description: Experimental Scientist/Research projects officer.

Institution: CSIRO - Oceans & Atmosphere

Why do I consider myself an RSE?: I am perhaps more of a data monkey than a software engineer, but I provide technical support to research scientists. That is, I get code to run, I pull data together into publishable structure, I write code to post-process and analyse data, I run models, I manage datasets, etc - I spend pretty much all my time in front of a terminal (or fighting the email Hydra!). As such, a lot of the tasks I do are aligned with the RSE community.

What do I do that is most valued by the people I'm helping?: Know where to find just about any climate & weather dataset, who to talk to about getting access, and what are the pros and cons of various Australian HPCs for different tasks through years of using them myself - in other words, general advice and assistance.

How many times have you been given short term contracts (less than 1 year) while working in research? Technically none, but years as a casual reappointed on a year-by-year basis (uni research assistant), one year part time, 2x 1yr full time, 1x 18mo full time, 2x 2yr full time. I'm now permanent and this is an amazing situation to be in.

What is the nicest compliment you have ever received when working as an RSE? "You're a star". I think I'd just pulled some data together at short notice, it seemed like just doing my job but my colleagues were super thankful, it's a great feeling.

What kind of tech/architecture do you use? HPC systems (mostly running Fortan models and python for data wrangling), and HPC-connected cloud appliances. I code predominantly in python and bash scripts, managed with git. I work in Linux, mostly through WSL or VNCs.

What tech would you like to learn next and why? I feel like I really need to get a good handle on HPC-scale python, and as I'm working with peta-scale data, I'd really like to learn a lot more about running multi-node dask jobs. That being said, that's a current need, there's always exciting new things to learn and practise and the constant opportunity to expand my knowledge and skills is a big part of what I love about the work I do.

HPerrett commented 5 years ago

Name: Heidi Perrett

Position Description: Snr Support Programmer / Software Support

Institution: Griffith University

Why do I consider myself an RSE?: I work as a Software Engineer/Research Support/IT Generalist for eResearch Support Services. A core part of my work involves liaising with, educating, supporting and developing applications with and for researchers and the research community at large.

What do I do that is most valued by the people I'm helping?: I believe my most valuable skill is being able to act as the conduit or interpreter between technical language and non-technical language.

How many times have you been given short term contracts (less than 1 year) while working in research? When I started working in this field I was on a causal contract for 10 hours a week (while also studying). This was gradually increased until I was on annual contracts and then became permanent. The period from my casual contract starting to becoming permanent was at least 4 years.

What is the nicest compliment you have ever received when working as an RSE? I get a lot of good vibes from being able to show people new ways of approaching a problem and seeing that light-bulb moment when they realise it might just work. So the nicest compliment was helping solve some JavaScript problems a survey client had been struggling with for a week or two and seeing how excited they became afterwards.

What kind of tech/architecture do you use? I have some solid favourites, I prefer Linux server over Windows server and MacOS over Windows OS but have experience with both. My preferred language is python and preferred editor is sublime 3. On top of that, it's whatever is required to do the job. The field is constantly changing and learning new things is a part of the appeal of the job.

What tech would you like to learn next and why? Oh so many things and so little time! I recently had a a great conversation about functional programming in Haskell that I'd like to peruse further. It sounds like it would be a very useful approach for some of the testing we've been doing in our team. I'm also looking at more advanced testing techniques and usable security in websites because I think they compliment each other well and are important features for researchers to be aware of.

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rowlandm commented 5 years ago

Hi All,

I realised that I didn't explicitly ask for your approval to use your profiles for social media, websites and print, and for distribution to other organisations where this might be of benefit to the RSE community.

Could you please respond either by editing your profile post (in https://github.com/rse-aunz/rse-au/issues/59) or by replying to me at rowland.mosbergen@unimelb.edu.au.

Totally OK if you want to limit it or take it out, but it's better to have this explicitly discussed before we move ahead.

And thanks for sharing your profile, it has been fantastic reading them!

Apologies in advance as I will also be posting this in the issues folder and sending an email to all RSE email list.

jonnyhtw commented 5 years ago

Hey @rowlandm

I've edited mine and am happy for it to be shared publicly.

All the best

Jonny

rowlandm commented 5 years ago

Hey @LindsayBradford - are you OK if we use your profile in social media etc?

ccarouge commented 5 years ago

Name: Claire Carouge

Position Description: Computational Modelling Support team leader

Institution: Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes

Why do I consider myself an RSE?: I improve the climate models for the Centre and help researchers with their analysis code. For this I rely on my domain knowledge to understand what the researchers really need. We are also in charge of managing compute and storage resources for the Centre. Finally as a leader, I have to communicate closely with other RSEs, HPC managers and scientists as such I am a generalist. The team is also in charge of finding technical solutions and as such as some decision powers on what issues to tackle and how to tackle them.

What do I do that is most valued by the people I'm helping?: It depends on who I ask. For students and ECRs, what is most valued is the work on code and models that make their work faster. For the CIs (some at least), what is most valued is the technical expertise and innovation I bring.

How many times have you been given short term contracts (less than 1 year) while working in research? Never. The shortest has been 1 year. It was always when starting at a new place which is understandable as there is the need for some kind of a “probation period”.

What is the nicest compliment you have ever received when working as an RSE? I’m not sure. It’s hard to pinpoint one. Most of the time, people are just incredibly grateful. I guess one of my favourite is when people hesitate to call on me for help and then completely change behaviour after having experienced being helped.

What kind of tech/architecture do you use? I use mainly Fortran, git, Jenkins, Python. I work exclusively on HPC.

What tech would you like to learn next and why? I’d like to investigate more cloud computing, workflow software like Airflow and machine learning.

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davidbenncsiro commented 5 years ago

Name: David Benn

Position Description: Software Engineer in Scientific Computing

Institution: CSIRO

Why do I consider myself an RSE? I develop software in a research context to help enable or accelerate their Science.

What do I do that is most valued by the people I'm helping? Parallelise code for use on HPC systems, create and run pipelines, post-process simulation results, make results available via web custom applications, write unit tests, port code between languages.

How many times have you been given short term contracts (less than 1 year) while working in research? A two year contract followed by an 18 month contract before an indefinite position.

What is the nicest compliment you have ever received when working as an RSE? After working on a small project, the researcher said he was blown away by the effort I had into put in to the work, as well as the extent to which I listened to what they were trying to do and find the most effective means to do what they needed. :)

What kind of tech/architecture do you use? HPC clusters, Linux, Python, R, C++, Fortran, MPI, OpenMP, Docker, git, collaboration tools (e.g. Jira, Confluence).

What tech would you like to learn next and why? Spend more time on GPU development, machine learning

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sharon-tickell commented 5 years ago

It's OK to share this in things related to the RSE community :) Name: Sharon Tickell (https://people.csiro.au/T/S/Sharon-Tickell)

Position Description: Senior software engineer

Institution: CSIRO - Oceans & Atmosphere

Why do I consider myself an RSE?: I consider myself primarily a software engineer, but embedded within the research community and working closely with researchers. I could not do my work without their expertise and input.

What do I do that is most valued by the people I'm helping?: Build operational systems that they can rely on for input to their research, and as a communication method for their results.

How many times have you been given short term contracts (less than 1 year) while working in research? None.

What is the nicest compliment you have ever received when working as an RSE? People wanting to reuse my work, or asking for my team to be involved in their projects.

What kind of tech/architecture do you use? Whatever is needed: Windows or linux OS, platforms including Ansible, bash, C++, C#, Docker, Go, Javascript, Java, Matlab, PHP, Python, Puppet, R, VB.... I do a lot of web development and sysadmin work on various platforms.

What tech would you like to learn next and why? On the tech side: more about container orchestration and storage provisioning, including how that can work in an HPC environment. My current biggest challenge is learning to scale my team and the work we can do.

MartinPaulo commented 5 years ago

Name: Martin Paulo

Position Description: Senior Developer

Institution: University of Melbourne

Why do I consider myself an RSE? When it comes to software development, I'm a 'jack of all trades'. For the past few years I've been helping researchers with their technology stack by:

What do I do that is most valued by the people I'm helping? Helping them to navigate and manage their technology options.

How many times have you been given short term contracts (less than 1 year) while working in research? My life at the University has been a series of fixed term (1 year) contracts.

What is the nicest compliment you have ever received when working as an RSE? Being approached by OpenStack to help create some of their training documentation.

What kind of tech/architecture do you use? Largely what is needed. That mostly lands up being either python scripts or chubby MVC web frameworks, such as Django. In a previous life I did a lot of Java coding.

What tech would you like to learn next and why? Kotlin and Android. Kotlin as it seems to be Java without the verbosity. Android, well, for the fun of it.

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truth-quark commented 5 years ago

Name: Ben Davies

Position Description: Senior Scientific Software Engineer

Institution: UNSW (& other universities)

Why do I consider myself an RSE?: My tertiary background is multi-disciplinary: earth/environmental sciences & computing. I've worked as a S/W engineer in university research environments for over a decade.

What do I do that is most valued by the people I'm helping?: Multiple things, as I work fairly broadly. I work directly with researchers and bridge the gap between researchers and software engineers:

How many times have you been given short term contracts (less than 1 year) while working in research? Once.

What is the nicest complient you have ever received when working as an RSE? "We're using [new tool name] and it kicks ass!" "Geez you guys are good to have around!"

What kind of tech/architecture do you use? Quite a lot of tools:

What tech would you like to learn next and why? Use Golang in anger for heavily concurrent science code. Dask & Blaze are on the list, as well as some complexity science/agent-oriented modelling tools.

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ghost commented 5 years ago

Bill Pascoe

Position Description: System Architect

Institution: University of Newcastle

Why do I consider myself an RSE?: Because I develop software for research. We do anything anywhere anytime.

What do I do that is most valued by the people I'm helping?: Everything, including their job. Sheesh.

How many times have you been given short term contracts (less than 1 year) while working in research? I honestly couldn't count them. Many per year for many years.

What is the nicest compliment you have ever received when working as an RSE? "We need you." or "Thanks for bringing out the truth." and similar.

What kind of tech/architecture do you use? Whatever works.

What tech would you like to learn next and why? Some of the following because I'm starting to feel a bit old and I'll be redundant if I don't catch up on these things, also a few alternatives for GIS and visualisation because we are all about maps in digital humanities right now: