Science Coding Conference - another successful year
Earlier this month, NeSI hosted the Science Coding Conference 2017 (the conference formerly known as the CRI Coding Conference). The meeting is an opportunity for software hackers and engineers working in the research sector to get together and discuss various techniques and processes, challenges and successes, all relating to their work developing scientific software code and applications.
This year's event was held at Massey University's Wellington campus and consisted of two days (August 1st and 2nd) of keynotes, presentations, real-time demonstrations and workshops. You can check out the programme here. Andrew Watkins has produced a wonderful conference wrap-up which can be found on his blog here.
Attendees came from a diverse group of organisations including (in no particular order): GNS, NIWA, Victoria University Wellington, University of Auckland, ESR, Plant & Food Research, NeSI, Landcare Research, MetService, Department of Conservation, University of Otago, Dragonfly, Scion, Stats NZ, Caldera, Manasys, ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Korea).
This diversity led to interesting conversations as the similarities and differences of working as scientific coders in different settings (academic, CRI, public sector, commercial) became apparent. There was a lot of discussion following Alys Brett’s presentation on the Research Software Engineer movement and there is now a call out for Expressions of Interest for a Research Software Engineers Australian and New Zealand chapter of the organisation. If this is something you would like to be a part of move, you can express your interest here. For those of you who were not able to attend this year's event, Alys's presentation can be found here.
NeSI enjoyed being part of bringing NZ's community of scientific software coders (or perhaps we should say New Zealand's Research Software Engineers) together once again in 2017. Planning is already underway for next year's event so watch this space and we will share the details with you as they come to hand.
