In early 2019 when US-RSE was being established, it was quickly clear that defining a research software engineer would be a challenging task. How could we compare apples and oranges, when one person might be heavily involved in open source software engineering, and another actively publishing, and a third with managerial duties, and a fourth doing administration for HPC?
RSE Stories is not limited to research software engineers in the United States. The host @vsoch happens to be located there, but it’s important that we share stories from across the RSE community, regardless of your geographic location.
Do you want to be interviewed on the show? We’d love to hear your story!
You can read more about the experience in our Contributing as a Guest guide.
Efforts to Define
While a more rigorous analysis would be warranted, there were several early efforts to start to discuss the definition of RSE:
- Super RSEs was a proposal that hypothesized three dimensions for RSEs.
- The Story of the Research Software Engineer presented the question as a story, and discussed different types of RSEs
- The RSE Phenotype Generator took the stance that the best way to define RSE was to ask people directly, and have them define any number of dimensions and communities served.
- The USRSE Blog can take similar initiative by presenting the work of a small set of self-selected RSEs.
- Why Research Software Engineers touched on the topic by describing the need for RSEs.
A Limited Scope
Do you see the issue with any of the above links? The challenge is that they come from a single (or small number) of perspectives. In fact, the most compelling definitions for what encompasses a research software engineer must come from the community itself. For this reason, we’ve created this podcast series to tell the stories of the hidden faces of research software engineering.
If you are interested in being interviewed for our show, please let us know! There is no official release schedule or advertising, so the interaction is fun and casual, and releases will be done as they are recorded and edited. We ask participants to create their RSE Phenotype, a plot that show the dimensions that define, and communities they are relevant for, as a practice in self introspection using the RSE Phenotype Generator. It’s up to you if you want to share the final graphic with RSE Stories, but we encourage you to do so!