Published 26th July 2024

Can you tell me where you are based and what your role is?

I’m a Research Software Engineer (RSE) at the University of Bristol. I also am currently the president of the Society of Research Software Engineering.

So, how did you get here? What does your journey look like?

I studied physics at university and then I went on to do a PhD in particle physics. It was relatively computation-based even at the point when I was looking at it. It was the days of “e-science” and I had my eye on that kind of thing but there wasn’t anywhere in the UK really doing it except the University of Edinburgh. For life reasons I didn’t want to move to Edinburgh, so I did a traditional PhD in particle physics and spent time at CERN. It was through that I found that the pure science (the hardcore Feynman diagrams and so on) was not my strength. I realised that what I enjoyed the most, I’m best at, can help the most with, was the software. I’ve been programming since I was younger than a teenager, because my dad used computers and my brother did programming. I had that support growing up, so I naturally fell into that and focused my energies more into software and supporting science through software. I like working at universities. I like doing publicly funded research and working for the public good which naturally led me into RSE, well RSEs didn’t exist at the time. I finished my PhD in 2013 and there weren’t any jobs as RSEs so I got a job at University of Birmingham basically doing RSE work. I was spending half my time programming and providing software support to researchers and half my time looking after computers and system administration. Then as that job was coming to an end because the grant finished, I saw a job advert in Bristol for a Research Software Engineer and by that point I’d come across the idea and I thought this is my chance to commit now to being a software person at a university rather than trying to be a post-doc from this point on. And that sort of drew me into the role of RSE.

Okay, so the other part of your journey is your life within the RSE Society and the wider community. Can you tell me how the community fits into that picture?

I started my job at Bristol in 2016 but before I’d started my job I was invited by Chris Woods, the person who hired me at Bristol, to come along to the RSE conference and see what was going on. He was on the organising committee so he reserved me a ticket and it was really great to see how the community there had created something. I’d been aware of it in the periphery but to be there at the first conference and see all that come together was really, really great. And when you go to a conference like that you see people who are doing stuff at high levels that look important and you think well that looks like you can have an impact and help and make things happen in the future. I thought that seemed like something I could help with and something I’d want to do. I want to help and  I also like the idea of being able to have some responsibility for making things happen and working at that level.

At that point it was just the RSE Association organising the conference, an informal group of people, they had a board of sorts. I think it was the year after in 2017 that they held elections for the board of the Association. The idea being that this particular board would be the ones who were going to be given the task of creating the Society. They knew at that point that this is what we’re going to be doing for the next year or two and so if you apply for this position and get it you’re going to be spending most of your time writing constitutional documents and arguing over fine print. Knowing that, I still applied to be on that board, and wasn’t elected. I think there were around twice as many people standing for that position as there were spaces. 

It was really a healthy community, people wanting to push that stuff to the next level. When the Society finally got formed in 2019, that summer they held the elections for the first board of trustees and so I thought I didn’t get elected last time but I still have the energy and I still want to be involved so I’m going to put myself forward again. Again there were a lot of candidates putting themselves forward, a really healthy engagement from the community wanting to join in. Luckily this time I was elected. 

I had no experience doing this kind of thing before. I’d never been on a charity board before, never been involved in organising this kind of thing. I’d done some conference organising for some of the previous RSE conferences but that’s always a relatively small focus: this is the journey of this conference and when it’s finished you’re finished. It’s a set project. So I didn’t really know what role I would have in the RSE Society. I had no real ambitions or aims, I just thought I wanted to take part. We had some discussions early on about what the role was going to be, very early in the Society before the president role was really called the president (it was just the chair at the time), trying to organise between ourselves who was going to be taking on which roles. I had an interest in the presidency at that point and I offered my services and said I’d be interested in doing this kind of thing but said if not then I’m happy to work as the vice treasurer. Another one of the trustees said a similar thing, they had those two roles they were looking at applying for and so as we were both talking about doing the same two roles we decided just to “you take one, I’ll take another”. So I worked as vice treasurer for a year and then went on to become the treasurer and after that no one else was willing to stand to be president and so after talking with the outgoing president I was encouraged to put myself forward because they thought I could do the job. And so I ended up as president and have been now for two years.

What’s your favourite thing about your role as the Society of RSE president?

I think the thing that I enjoy the most about being the president is the skills that I’ve got from it.

In my day job I am an RSE, part of a pool of RSEs who all work on research projects. We all have our own skills but we are at an equal level. I have to do admin work like book rooms and email people, but I’ve got no management experience in my day job. But it’s something that I feel like I wanted to find out more about. I wanted to get an opportunity to learn about how that kind of thing works – management is one of those things you can’t just read a book and be a manager, you actually need to be able to manage people and see how that goes. And so as the president I found it was really useful to just learn how the whole thing works. I probably should read a book about it, that might help as well! But just the hands-on experience of organising a group of volunteers who all have a more or less common purpose to get towards the aims that we’re trying to do is really interesting. I really enjoy the challenges that come with it. It’s great having a team of trustees who are independent and play along. That’s really valuable in a team. You need people who you can ask to do something and they’ll do it or will be doing stuff without you even having asked. That’s really, really valuable. 

Most of the time what I’m doing is just being the last line of defence. The one who’s got all the things in my head of these things need to happen on this time scale throughout the year. I need to make sure that this working group’s been kicked off, this sort of thing’s happened. Again, just that management of a team and the projects they’re in is something I haven’t had much experience with. With management I’m learning that a lot of it’s about identifying the people in the team, what their skills are, what their interests are and finding ways to leverage that appropriately. I hadn’t even thought about that kind of thing before because I’ve never been in the place to have any say over what people do and so where possible I don’t need to be involved in telling people what to do. Except perhaps in that first week of trusteeship when we’re putting people into working groups and saying “you’re working on this” and people are asking what this involves, but this kind of settles down over the months and you find that people just naturally take up focusing on certain areas and take up work on other areas as interesting.

Is there anything, looking back with the experience you’ve got, anything you’d do differently either in your role as treasurer or more recently as president?

Always. Most of the reason why those things were done the way they were or that they weren’t done is just due to time. In a perfect world I’d be able to work full time as a president and be able to clear that backlog of issues we’ve got on GitHub, understand how all these things work together, create lightweight processes so we understand what’s going on with things being able to check in with people on a regular basis, understand when people are falling behind or getting busy. That active management is a full time job and that’s something that I can’t do here, and I don’t need to most of the time. You don’t always notice the times when it is needed

because you don’t have the time to do that sort of active, ongoing maintenance of

a team of 10. This year we’re going to be up to 14 trustees, that’s a large team to be managing when everyone is volunteering. There’s always things on our list to do around

how we share the work between the trustees, how we can identify when people are overloaded and reduce the workload on them that ideally would have already been done. I have been and we as trustees have been in a position to do something about it but it’s always about prioritisation. We always have to prioritise the ongoing maintenance of the Society before you can start putting on the nice-to-haves on top of it but you eventually reach a point where it’s nice to have to become requirements because people become worn out basically.

Is there anything particularly unexpected or surprising that you’ve found about your role as president?

I didn’t know what I was getting in for exactly. In my first year of presidency I was very, very deep into constitutional matters. Reading into the constitution because we were trying to resolve some niggly things around how we deal with conflicts within the trustees. The constitution was written a while back, based on the model constitution without the benefit of hindsight. Now we were actually in it, there was a process of redoing a lot of stuff. I never expected that I’d become a constitutional law expert going on gov.uk and finding out where the actual legislation was. Before taking the role I spoke to the outgoing President Paul Richmond and he wrote some documents for me and explained what the ongoing processes were but you still don’t know what it is going to be like until you get there. I think that it’s a different kind of hard work to what I expected. It’s a lot of just keeping track of things rather than necessarily lots of writing documents. Maybe that’s because that’s just where my skill preferences lie. I’m going to be better at keeping track of things than I am at creating new things.

Similarly in my time as treasurer I didn’t have any experience going into that and suddenly I had to go and learn all this different terminology, learning what the difference between accruals and cash basis is and so on. I had no reason to be engaged with that beforehand.

For all the trustee positions you don’t know what it’s going to be like before you get there and suddenly we’re sending you a 17 page document and saying here’s the onboarding and they each link to another 20 page document and then suddenly you think this is a lot of stuff but then six months later you’re doing something completely different, you may be working on something you’re interested in or maybe you’re getting dragged down into the details of comparing membership platforms with each other.

If you were to give one single call-to-arms to people within the research software engineering community what would that be?

I think it would be to support each other.

The community-building aspect of all aspects of life are incredibly important. Communities and tribes and societies exist for a reason because you come together with a common purpose and when you’re a newly created community like research software engineers are it’s very easy to identify allies early on and kind of close ranks around the people you feel comfortable with and accidentally exclude people coming in from the outside, people who are on the periphery who maybe don’t identify as RSEs, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to be part of our community. So make sure that you’re keeping your arms open and welcoming everyone in because that’s how we’re going to build up the strength and diversity of the people who are going to be doing everything going forward. Money’s worth something if you want to hire someone but if you don’t have community and people willing to do things you’re never going to get anywhere. I think the first line is increasing that wealth of humanity that we can have when we’re trying to create this community. Being kind and welcoming I think is the foundational principle without which we’re not going to get anywhere.

From your perspective as a leader within this community what advice do you have to RSEs, on a day to day professional basis?

I think that you need to take pride in your work and to make the time to be rigorous with what you do. Science, engineering, digital humanities and art, all those things come with a certain level of rigour that’s needed. My background is in the physical sciences and there, if you want to discover a new piece of science you need to do it honestly and earnestly and follow the scientific method and not cut corners. Software is misunderstood by many people in the echelons above where we work and justifying to them, finding ways to explain to them the value in what you’re doing and why you should be investing this time to test your code to make sure it’s giving an answer which you understand. Validating against reality, documenting what you’re doing in order to be able to have longevity of the project and make something that’s sustainable and is going to be able to last into the future is really important. 

I think it’s really important that we lockdown those foundational core aspects of what we identify as Research Software Engineering, as opposed to someone who has just happened to write some code alongside some research. That latter category is valid and useful but if we want to increase the trust that science and associated disciplines have in Research Software Engineers I think we need to prove to them that we’re able to do this in a sustainable, understandable and reproducible way. That requires all of us to take the time to do that and therefore it sometimes can make your work take twice as long and make you feel less productive but in the long run all the outcomes are going to be better on a shorter time scale because you’re going to make fewer mistakes. It’s important that we share that idea of “let’s try and do this properly” and find where that happy medium is, where you don’t have to lock everything down like Fort Knox and make it perfect, but find the place where you’re getting the most benefit from it before getting diminishing returns. I think locking down those foundational core principles of testing, documentation, licensing, sharing and distribution is really important, and these are things that as a community we don’t necessarily spend as much time sharing best practices on as we would otherwise. 

Perhaps this is partly because it can feel a bit opinionated and partly because it’s very specific to the technology that you’re using, e.g. someone using Fortran is going to have a different set of tools and techniques that they’re using than someone using R. The reasons for doing it are the same but someone can’t come in and say “you should use this Fortran testing framework for your work” because they’ll be saying “I’m using R so I can’t use that Fortran testing framework” and maybe in 10 years time the things will all change. It’s hard to come up with a set of rules so instead I think all you can have is a set of principles that underlie it. I think we’re starting to come together and work out if we can agree as a community a way to describe this all to people so they understand what the starting point for decision making on that stuff should be and where they should then be able to diverge and experiment for themselves.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to be a big part of the community and who wants to invest time and energy. How do they do that?

I think the key thing is to know that it’s okay to start small. It’s all right to just have a monthly or six-monthly meeting in your research group where you talk about these sorts of topics. You don’t have to suddenly stand up and run as a trustee of the board of the Society of RSE, you can start helping those people around you and form a community there. That’s going to give you experience with running meetings and organising events or booking catering or whatever it is you end up doing, and that’s a really good place to hone those early skills. Then there’s quite a clear progression of opportunities in the Society for increasing your involvement: obvious ones are getting involved in the working groups that the Society runs. At the moment we have a communications working group who deal with newsletters and Twitter and that kind of thing,

they’re always looking for people to come and help out, no experience needed, just the willingness to take part. Similarly the EDIA (Equality, Diversity, Inclusivity and Accessibility) and Role Diversity working group that’s open to members and they’re looking for people to come along and have energy and contribute ideas and help out with things.

Those are places where you don’t need to demonstrate that you’re an expert in this stuff and you’ve done it before and you’re going to come and save the day, they just want someone who has some time and energy and is willing to help out with things. From that level you can go up to being on the conference organising committee, that was how I started out, from 2017-2019 I was on the conference committee and in that situation there’s a whole diversity of roles. Right at the top, the programme and the logistics chairs which are incredibly hard jobs to do and not the place to start but you can start as a volunteer at the conference, you can volunteer to be the poster chair or the talk chair or the workshop chair. If you’re working with another individual you can maybe get some mentoring on those roles and get some help on how those things work. Then from that point on you can look forward to perhaps working as a trustee of a society. That is not the end goal but it’s certainly a part of that journey which you might do. 

So it’s very easy to start small, just look after the people around you and keep talking to people, come to events and ask people about how they got involved in stuff, look into these RSE journeys and see what other people did and see what their journeys were. It might inspire you and make you realise that there’s a path there that you’re already on and that there’s a step that you can take and that if you want some help with taking that step you can go and ask for some help and that’s okay.