What are some of your favorite conferences/events for RSEs?

[NickleDave]

I have to say the SciPy conference -- when I went for the first time in 2015, I finally felt like I had found my "tribe" in research

https://www.scipy2021.scipy.org/

[vsoch]

Big events like conferences make me fairly anxious as an introvert (too many people, too much noise) so this is a hard question for me to answer, but I'll take a shot and provide a more non-traditional answer. I'm not sure this would be considered by others as a conference or event, but my favorite time of year (as an #rseng) would have to be when we have GitHub's Hacktoberfest, and people get excited about contributing to open source projects. Granted that last year was a bit of a mess (and I hope the event recovers) in the previous years it's always been a lot of fun, and I enjoy receiving the T-shirt and stickers.

Aside from that, and from USRSE calls, I'm not sure that I can claim having been to an #rseng event. I could name conferences like Supercomputing or PEARC, but I've found those fairly stressful in terms of size (for the reasons above) and I don't think they are really aimed specifically at research software engineering - it's totally all about HPC, and if you don't drink that koolaid strongly you're a bit out of place. I'm wondering about other's opinions that have a hard time with lots of people / noise - what events are friendly to this phenotype?

[NickleDave]

Neurohackademy came up on Twitter as a similar event -- guessing you're probably familiar with it but thought I'd just add it to the discussion here

http://neurohackweek.github.io/

[cmaimone]

RStudio conference was the most fun I've had at a conference and where there were the most talks I actually wanted to hear -- went a few years ago when it was a bit smaller - not RSE specific, but with lots of academic and research use of R, there was definitely that component present, and ran into lots of research folks. Like V, conferences also make me anxious, but I felt comfortable at this one and actually talked to multiple strangers :) which is why I recommend it. Not sure if it will be able to maintain the same feeling if it continues to grow.

For any women/non-binary/trans folks: the write/speak/code conference/workshop was also a really great experience: https://www.writespeakcode.com/- not RSE specific, but it's about increasing visibility for your work, which is relevant to everyone

[danielskatz]

In non-pandemic years, I like SC, mostly because there are so many people there and it's a chance to catch up with those I don't regularly see.

I also find IEEE eScience good because it mixes technology development with applications, including software, and is rare place to publish papers on this mix.

[williamfgc]

In my search for RSE dedicated venues I came across (never attended):

• SE4Science Workshop in ICCS , I submitted a paper recently, wish me luck.
• SEA's Improving Scientific Software Conference

I attended JuliaCon 2020 virtually and plan to attend in 2021. Unlike Python, which is general purpose and much broader in scope, Julia targets more scientific computing needs, so the presentations overlap a lot with RSE related work (I'd think R as well).

Overall, there are few RSE exclusive venues, mostly SE or domain-specific. Perhaps, it's time for US-RSE to have its own?

[vsoch]

Good luck! 🍀

[NickleDave]

🤞

[danielskatz]

I should also mention the SSI-created events:

• Collaborations Workshop in the spring
• RSEcon in the fall

Also, there's the Collegeville workshops we've had the last 2 years, alternating annually between software sustainability and software productivity

[NickleDave]

the Collaborations Workshop just came up on the code review community call ... guess I'm going!

[NickleDave]

Thanks all for sharing.
I don't know if this is helping anybody else but I'm learning a lot.

I did ask for input from the Twittersphere
https://twitter.com/nicholdav/status/1364956638592049157

Actually just got a reminder about MozFest
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/explore-the-mozfest-2021-schedule/
which to me falls under the category of "events that are virtual and maybe more-like 'RSE-adjacent' but definitely a place where people are discussing things we should be probably be thinking about".
Like the hackathons and other workshops that @vsoch and @cmaimone pointed us to.

More info on some of the talks here:
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/announcing-the-mozfest-2021-dialogues-debates/

[vsoch]

I don't know how I missed that Tweet thread, you did a great job! If I ever miss it again, please ping me on Slack so that I can like and retweet (with the USRSE account). This is an important community effort, and we must share it!

[NickleDave]

thought I replied to this?

thank you, I will ping you next time

I figured you were busy actually programming instead of wasting time on twitter

[vsoch]

haha yeah I was, but I felt badly that I didn't see it (because it's important to share from usrse too!)

And I waste oodles of time on Twitter! It's a good platform for introvert (or COVID times) socializing.

[NickleDave]

I think @itamarst had recommended PyCon

of course a good addition
https://us.pycon.org/2021/

along the same lines, feel like we should mention JupyterCon
https://cfp.jupytercon.com/2020/schedule/general-sessions/

probably a lot of people are aware both exist, but maybe worth the reminder that there is definitely content there for RSEs even if that's not what the whole conference is about

[mwcraig]

My favorite is SciPy. A more domain-specific conference that is still focused on software instead of science is Python in Astronomy.

[NickleDave]

Excellent, thank you @mwcraig -- definitely good to know about domain-specific conferences too.

Dreaming of a day when every scientific domain has its own OSS conference 😢

[nickrsan]

CSVConf in the spring is my favorite - lots of people there who aren't completely RSE, but most of the topics are very relevant for RSEs. Has been in Portland in the past, but they were planning to start moving it around before COVID hit last year (it was going to be in DC). They run an effective virtual conference too.