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During a Software Carpentry course you, as an instructor, stand in front of a class typing your lesson content, eg bash or git, and the students type what you type into their own shell.

Depending on the layout of the room, you need to make the font on your terminal large enough for all students to see it, which can be somewhat disorientating as an instructor. Moreover if the layout of the room is not ideal, eg some students are facing away from the screen, they will have to constantly turn to see the screen, which can be a pain for them. But I recently found a Python app that changes all that.

Edinburgh just held its inaugural Research Software Engineer (RSE) meeting at the Bayes Centre (also home to EPCC). It was attended by about 50 people from the Edinburgh area. If you don't know what a Research Software Engineer is, I urge you to look at Andy's slides for context and background.

Regular readers will already know that EPCC was planning to attend New Scientist Live again this year. Despite our concerns about getting to London as Storm Ali bore down on us, we made it, and I’m happy to report we had a very successful and enjoyable trip!

I recently attended the Third Research Software Engineers (RSE) conference in Birmingham, UK. RSE conferences bring together people who work in an RSE-type roll from across the UK and world.

For anyone who doesn’t know, an RSE is typically someone who has expertise in both coding and research but is not necessarily a pure computer programmer or pure researcher. Often RSEs can be the only such person in their department and thus the conference gives them a chance meet other people doing similar roles to share their experiences and help them feel part of a much larger community.