What's the next level up in terms of RSE skills?
DamienIrving opened this issue · comments
TLDR: What is the answer to this twitter thread?
I was recently reading over A National Agenda for Research Software and the authors essentially define three categories of research software authors (with my simple interpretation of what they are in brackets):
- Researchers (i.e. writing analysis code for themselves)
- Nascent research software engineers (writing research software shared/used among their team and/or a small user community)
- Research software engineers (writing and maintaining critical and potentially complex research software with a large user base)
I feel like the Software Carpentry lesson materials are aimed at category 1 and our book is aimed at category 2. So what about category 3? Are there a bunch of advanced topics we didn't include in our book that people need to learn to move from category 2 to 3? Are those advanced topics captured in a book that already exists? I guess what I'm asking is, do we expect that people can progress from 1 to 3 without doing a full software engineering degree and if so, are there resources to help people get from 2 to 3?
- Most programmers in industry who get to 3 do so without the "benefit" of a software engineering degree: it's all on-the-job learn-by-imitation-and-googling.
- I'd like to warm up https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kZ3JFO3GZwM7cmV1Syi7Pz0aQ5okfn6t some day; the talk I'm doing next week on software design for data scientists will hopefully turn into a new module for it. I'll retire some of the existing modules (e.g., workflow and automation) that are part of your "2"; what else should be in here to make it suitable for "3"?
Thanks, @gvwilson.
- I suspected as much.
- It looks like most of the content of those slides is covered in our book... perhaps I'm underselling the book and it does in fact service "2" and "3"?!
I think we do a good job of getting 2 to 3, and I hope there will be some new stuff in the book even for (the very small percentage of) researchers who are already at level 3. I honestly don't know what to recommend after that, even to people in industry: https://aosabook.org/ was my attempt to provide more concentrated material, but it didn't move the needle noticeably. I've thought more than once about trying to organize an AOSA-like volume on "The Architecture of Open Science Applications", but so far my saner half has fended it off :-)