This month we have a bumper collection of top tips from our Research Software Engineers (RSEs)! They are passing on a selection of good practice tips which they advise all researchers who develop or write software, to consider adopting.

Our Research Software Engineers (RSE) provide a range of services including support for existing activities at the University. Find out more about how they are helping the National Drug Evidence Centre (NDEC) to keep their key services up to date.

Ian Hinder, Research Software Engineer (RSE) from Research IT recently attended a GPU Hackathon at the University of Sheffield. In this blog post he explains the outcomes of the event and the benefits of having research software engineers involved in research projects.

The Research IT Mobile Development Service (MDS) enjoyed a popular launch back in April 2019 with 6 requests for services received in the first month alone. One project was commissioned immediately, and we are proud to announce it as the first app from the new MDS to roll off the production line. Ahead of schedule, it officially moves into production for release through the Google Play store and the Apple App Store by the end of the month.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will soon put out a call for applications for open source software projects that are essential to biomedical research. Applicants can request funding between $50k and $250k for one year. If you are interested in applying then please get in touch!

Come along to the Research IT club on the 4th of April to find out more about our new mobile application development service. If you want to use mobile apps in your research or are interested in having an app developed as part of a research grant application, then this is the Research IT Club for you!

Data visualization, virtual reality (VR) and mixed/augmented reality (MR/AR) technologies offer exciting opportunities for researchers to explore and understand their research data. Prominent in the news and rapidly evolving, the technology is finally having a massive impact. Research IT has identified this as a largely untapped potential within the research environment and is now formally announcing vDAL - The Visualization And Data Analysis Laboratory.

This Spring Research IT are hosting NAG who are running a two day practical hands-on workshop on Fortran Modernization on the 4^th and 5^th of April 2019.

Many University of Manchester researchers were users of N8 HPC and the computational resource, Polaris. Polaris was switched off at the end of July and N8 HPC has now been relaunched as N8 Centre of Excellence for Computationally Intensive Research (N8 CIR).

Join fellow R users at the next meeting of the University of Manchester R user group on Wednesday 28th November from 12:00 -13:00 at University Place room no 3.205. Come along, bring your lunch, and meet R users from across the university.

As part of the Data Science Research Partnership between BBC R&D and the University of Manchester, one of our research software engineers (RSE), Josh Woodcock, spent 3 months working with BBC R&D to develop a way to visualise click data from an internal trial of the Cook-Along Kitchen Experience (CAKE). Involved in the project were Jonathan Carlton (PhD student with BBC R&D and University of Manchester), Andy Brown (BBC R&D), John Keane and Caroline Jay (University of Manchester).

It may be the summer but our team is as busy as ever! David Mawdsley (Research Software Engineer) is putting together a new workshop on Shiny. This is an R package that makes it easy to make interactive web apps using R.