Research IT

Multi-skilled Research Software Engineers

If you, as a researcher, are thinking of requesting help from our team of Research Software Engineers (RSEs), you may want to know what skills they have. By 'skills' we mean everything from programming languages through specification, methods and testing (to name just some). Ian Cottam describes how we've made it easy to find out.

Most (but not quite all, yet) of Research IT's RSE team and their skills can be found on our new clickable and searchable graph. You can see specific skills of an RSE or which of the team share a skill (and related tools and techniques). If you use the search box and nothing is found, you will see a full and also clickable list of skills. We use main entries in Wikipedia as a sort of controlled vocabulary (to avoid things like SGE vs Grid Engine vs Oracle Grid Engine).

skillsgraph

The original code base used by Ian came from Professor Steve Pettifer in Computer Science where it was used to help students find suitable supervisors. Our local modifications are maintained by RSEs Ian Hinder and Ian Cottam. GitHub/git is used so that individual RSEs can update their entries at any time – a feature of GitHub/git that could benefit many research groups too (e.g. for controlled multi-person updates to research code and data).

If you would like to find out more about the skills graph please get in touch.