CCT DS team at US-RSE ‘24 conference

Eric and Kristina had a chance to attend the second annual United States Research Software Engineer Association (US-RSE) conference in Albuquerque in October 2024. The goals of the US-RSE organization are to promote and strengthen the RSE career path and build community among RSEs. It is a welcoming, mostly volunteer-run group created in 2018. 

This was our first time at this conference, which was very useful and well organized! There was quite a lot of group management and leadership content, including the birds of a feather session that Kristina co-ran with Abbey Roelofs on RSE culture (blog post forthcoming!). There were other interesting birds of a feather session, in particular one where groups built their own lego city using scrum methodology. There were useful technical presentations, with one standout for us being on the Codefair tool. 

Some other unique things from the conference was a community corner with games, including a community-assembled puzzle, crowd-sourced Rapid Access Microtalks, and pre-conference online tutorials (our group just ran a workshop on GitHub Actions based partially on their tutorial!). Kristina had a chance to get to know the Better Scientific Software folks, who are doing a great job at supporting scientific software projects and doing excellent community building work. 

Some of our follow-on work from the conference include contributing to the RSE community at the University of Arizona (and among all three public Arizona universities) and expanding the representation of the R community in US-RSE. A big thank you to Better Scientific Software and US-RSE for supporting our travel to this conference! 

Links: 

• Eric’s talk on using R with HPCs
• Kristina’s talk on the CCT Data Science team 
• Volunteer to help organize next year’s conference! https://us-rse.org/usrse25/about/organization/