This week marks my final week as an RSE at the University of Leeds. It has been a tremendous (just under) 4 years of work but now it's time to move on.
I'm joining Active Travel England as lead developer as part of their data and digital team and hope to blog more about their work but this post I'm going to dedicate to Research Computing at the University of Leeds.
I'll indulge a little and say back in 2014 when I started a PhD at the faculty of biology, little did I know I'd be a research software engineer some 5 years later. I started with little computer science knowledge but over my PhD came to find R and Python as the right tools for automating analysis and visualisation. And once starting down this path I found coding (and software) more interesting and rewarding than my lab work, so moved over into data science and eventually software engineering.
I felt lucky, frankly, to start as a research software engineer at Leeds in 2019. I had no computer science background, 1 year as a data scientist and little in my portfolio on GitHub. But at Leeds we had a great team, a broad remit and a flexibility to try things and learn from our mistakes. So I was given the freedom to work with R and Python but also learn Linux at the command line, learn how to make your code tick on a HPC and on a GPU. I was challenged to teach what I knew and learn to teach what I didn't and got better, all the more for it. I was given the space to grow, to learn about cloud technologies, to learn about software engineering, to learn about research software and I am better and grateful for it.
I'm really proud of projects we supported and the hundreds of students we've taught over my time there. From providing HPC capacity to the COVID vaccine effort, improving data pipelines in the institute for transport studies to deploying research applications to the cloud, teaching R, Python and git and all of the unsung work helping researchers get more research done by advising them on using high performance computing better. Our team, whilst small, has kept research ticking along on our high performance computing platforms and helped drive innovative work through training. We've also worked to build a community through events such as our TechTalk series and through the first ever research computing conference. We've tried to punch above our weight and strive to enable research through central IT and I know the team will continue to do so.
We also weathered a once in a generation pandemic. Ensuring our HPC service stayed live and available from off campus and adapted to how we'd deliver our training and support from a purely remote setting. I can't say enough about how important this was, we went from seeing each other every day in person, to every day remotely. These are the people who puzzled through one of the most discombobulating periods of my life with me, together and for that I will be eternally grateful.
Over my time I've seen how much of a difference research software engineering can make to world class research. I have also seen the challenges faced to better recognise and adopt research software engineering as a central provision at Universities and worked to advocate for RSE during my time at Leeds. I will continue to do this whole heartedly from the outside because I recognise the importance and impact of RSE in making research world class.
For me, my time as an RSE is coming to an end. But my belief in the importance of RSE is only strengthened by my time working with and meeting other RSEs. I will always give my adherent support to the research software engineering movement (in all it forms) going forward and whilst I may not be in (for now) I will always be ready to speak up for RSE in the future.
To RSEs everywhere, your contribution is worthy and makes our research better. To Research Computing at Leeds, thank you for everything (the good and the bad), keep true to yourselves and keep making a difference.