RCT #188 -Immediate next steps for managers worried cuts are coming
Plus: Influencing people; Who’s using LLMs (hint: our users); USRE’25 CFP; Source Available Licenses; Many-Analyst Papers and what they say for our work;...
RCT #187 - Challenging times ahead
Plus: Northwestern University; Massively multiplayer retrospectives; Strategic frameworks framework; How biotechs use software and data to make drugs;...
RCT #186 - Northwestern's experience with success stories.
Plus: Standups; Lockwood on life in industry; Best forking practices; Energy debugging; Genomic data cybersecurity and privacy from NIST; and Slinky for...
RCT #185 - Research Judgement Must Direct Research Resources. Plus: Good software engineer teammembers; Free tier as a business model; STRUDEL and UX; Python 3.13; Writing code for humans; Next level HPC support; Rackspace and OpenStack
Hi, all! Sorry for the pause in newsletter issues; I’m trying to figure out how to better work the newsletter writing into my weeks. You may see shorter...
RCT #184 - The Job Market for Our Community. Plus: Actual managment; ChemOS; Google's View of Software Quality; SciCode codeing benchmarks; Leonhard Med TRE; Blender for scientific Viz; the Anaconda mess
Hi, everyone: Happy September! For those of you, like me, in the Northern Hemisphere, I hope you enjoyed your summer and that the academic year is off to a...
From the RCT Archives: #142 - Other Teams Aren't the Competition
Hi, everyone! This is the last of my over-the-summer “From the Archives” issues - this one from Oct 2022. We’ll get started with regular posting in the next...
From the RCT Archives: #123 - Research Support Teams are Vendors, Too
Hi, everyone! Over the summer I'll mostly be sending out issues from the archives, like below, from May 2022. The job board highlights, though, at the end,...
RCT #183 - We Need To Talk About AI. Plus: Upfront technical requirements are possible; (Too much) Manual work is a bug; Technical governance and leadership; Define your audience better than 'non-experts'; Microvms and Isolation
I think I’ve served you poorly by not writing more about AI. As many of you know, my current day job is with a company now best known as an AI...
RCT #182 - Scientific judgement is part of our job. Plus: Parking lots; Stop hiding in the comfort of your expertise; No wrong doors; Sales is research; Mentoring plans mandatory for NIH funding; NIHR RSS funding; Communities sustain software; Seqera containers
In follow up conversations from our series on the research impact flywheel, the issue that keeps coming up for people is discomfort with making choices about...
RCT #181 - Positioning, Marketing, and Other Bad Words. Plus: Onboarding instead of sink-or-swim; Making your next week earlier with an hour of planning; Visually communicating software design; HPC containers; and HPC desktops
I want to close our discussion that started way back in #176 about this flywheel we want to keep going, by going back to the start. In #176, I talked about...
RCT #180 - Fundability and Staffability. Plus: Successes and Struggles of Horizon 2020; Research Management as a profession; RSE Competencies; NASA Transform to Open Science; Infrastructure for Research on Teaching; CaRCC Engagement Guide for Smaller Institutions
For the last four issues we’ve been walking our way around the flywheel of research computing teams, looking at the external forces tugging on our teams —...
RCT #179 - Success Stories are the best advocacy. Plus: Avoiding hero work pays off in the end; Good progress updates; Design is not recoverable from implementation; Product management at a science tech company; Code-review.org; Configuration shouldn't change version-controlled source code
We’re going to continue the series based on this seemingly simple diagram. The diagram sketches out the flywheel of a successful technical research support...
RCT #178 - Offer services worth paying for. Plus: Effective vendor relationships; Teaching Humanists Changed How This Team Teaches Everyone; Service sludge toolkit; Existing knowledge and collaborations improves agility
Offer Services Researchers Would Be Willing To Pay For I want to keep talking about this diagram, and point out something that seems logical to the point of...
RCT #177 - Do the highest bang-for-buck work. Plus: What to say after a failure; GitHub Copilot’s productivity benefits; Research data services landscape at Canadian and US institutions; What modern NVMes can do.
Do the highest bang-for-buck work. Plus: What to say after a failure; GitHub Copilot’s productivity benefits; Research data services landscape at Canadian...
RCT #176 - Nurture your best clients first. Plus: Write and get feedback on tech specs; technical documentation guidebook; wrap up projects; talent leaks out of funding gaps; reproducibility of jupyter notebooks; 10 simple rules to manage lab data; NIST on HPC security"
Nurture your best clients first. Plus: Write and get feedback on tech specs; technical documentation guidebook; wrap up projects; talent leaks out of funding...
RCT #175 - Digital Humanities’ LLM Edge? Plus: EOLing a Product; Product vs Project; Directing Contributors Where Needed; Commercial Products and Reproducibility; Federated Analysis Primer; And the Job Board Returns, Maybe?
Happy 2024! RCT took a bit of an unplanned long holiday break, due to life intervening; all’s well now, and I’m looking forward to the year ahead. The next...
RCT #174 - Roundup - Building trust; Internal engineering conferences; Don't get stuck on finding a mentor; SlackLog; Single Decision Makers; Incident Response and Postmortems
Hi, all! The holiday season is starting! I don’t have an essay here for you this week, but I do have lots to share with you in the roundup - so let’s get...
RCT #173 - The measuring stick is the best teams, not the absence of work. Plus: I2ic organization report; New CaRCC Capabilities Model Assessment Tool; EPSCoR CI Recommendations; Racks as the unit of infrastructure; Slurm on Kubernetes
There’s a number of technical research support teams where the institution would be better served by disbanding the team and freeing up the money for...
RCT #172 - 'We Can’t Hire' isn’t a good enough bug report. Plus: Management Problems at ITER; Valuable Software is Updated
Over in the other place I encourage readers to use their existing scientific skills and apply them to how they work as a manager. There's a lot of...
RCT #171 - Know What Your CIO Is Thinking about AI. Plus: The fast track tip; Huh as a signal; Prioritization together; Strategy as group choosing; Lessons from building CLIs
Do you know what your CIO is thinking about and planning for AI? We owe it to research at our institutions to know, and to both shape their thinking and...
RCT #170 - Risk Management and Gratis Offerings. Plus: Making connections; Understand the underlying dynamics before trying to Change Things; Hiring RSEs and Data Scientists; Influencing Stakeholders; Mojo; MLIR; We’ve disparaged waterfall unfairly; Research forges; Python + Excel = TLA; Overcoming Ops Debt
I’m back from summer break, recharged and refreshed - I hope you are, too! Now that I’m back, I’ll be testing out a biweekly cadence for this newsletter,...
RCT #169 - Why I Don’t Like “Strategy”, Part II: Execution First; Plus: Rotate external presentations with the Share-Out; Cognitive load; Data engineering code is software, not duct tape; LLM tools
"Strategy without execution is irrelevant" - before tackling strategy, focus on routine management issues like collaboration and team functioning.
RCT #168 - There’s no such single thing as strategy. Plus: Right-sizing postmortems; surviving your software project’s first 100,000 lines; Maintainer Month; Good First Issues and Mentorship; Promoting Our Organizations
Why I Don’t Like “Strategy”, Part I: No Such Single Thing After over three years writing the newsletter and talking with RCD managers more frequently, the...
RCT #167 - Case Discussion: Advising The Peer Whose Key Team Member Is Leaving. Plus: Getting retrospectives right; Productized Services; Mojo; LLNL Sees Fortran’s Risks; Attack of the micro LLMs
Dealing with the sudden departure of an experienced team member and managing priorities and stakeholders during the transition.
RCT #166 - Case Discussion: a key team member leaves. Plus: Making tools easy to use; Using ChatGPT for technical writing; RSE-AUNZ’s strategy process; ACM CHI 2023 highlights; C4DC data sharing agreement library; Arrow and Apache Superset for data dashboards; Front-line data science; Learning from near misses
Here’s the first in what will be a recurring series of case study/tabletop exercise: the team member a manager most relies on announces they’re leaving. In...
RCT #165 - Holding ourselves to high standards. Plus: Missteps of a new technical lead; Balancing customization and standard offerings; Comparing embedded analytics databases; RDMA within Azure; DDR4 organization and bandwidth; checklists for psychological safety
I’m going to close out this discussion of focussing on the ends (outcomes and impact) and not the means, and measuring what matters, with a point that I...
RCT #164 - The Logic Of Collaboration For Nonprofits Like Us. Plus: Northwestern’s student workforce program; Speeding up processes; Declare backlog bankruptcy; Unit testing data code.
The Logic of Collaboration For Nonprofits Like Us In this third issue in the "measure what matters" series, I want to continue on the topic of planning and...
RCT #163 - Measure What Matters - Logic Models. Plus: Reducing the lottery factor; Polars; LLMs in Production; Cloud-first databases.
Last week (#162) I spent a lot of time on training evaluation and the Kirkpatrick model, but the underlying idea has much wider application. We chose...
RCT #162 - Measure what matters, Part I: Kirkpatrick Models. Plus: Role of a Tech Lead; User Interviews 101; Shared Services Organizations; Maintainer Guides; Refactoring; ROI
I’ve had some great conversations following up from the surveys article (#159) - thanks! You’ll likely remember that my argument was that while surveys can,...
RCT #161 - Supporting RCD teams as standards rise; Project management for developers; LLMs, software development, and Copilot X; Test flakiness, languages, and fixes; persistent identifiers; SRE approach to risk management
I feel strongly about the RCT job board — operationally, one of the things that defines a profession is some common places to look for new career...
RCT #160 - Become the go-to team; Remove uncertainty first; Drop the plastic balls; User research; Research software categories; RSE Onramps; When do hard drives fail
Research Computing and Data managers typically have a lot more responsibility for given level of seniority than (say) equivalent levels in a large company....
RCT #159 - Use surveys sparingly; Iterative strategy; Stuff costs money; The lone developer problem; Using incidents to improve reliability; Backblaze SSD stats
How many surveys have you skipped over or deleted in emails or web pages in the last month? Whenever I suggest we talk to people more often, the question of...
RCT #158 - Find out what has the most research impact by asking researchers; Stop overhelping; When and how to address tech debt; Build a behavioural answer database; Research software needs in arts & humanities, and ecology; Pandas 2.0 and Arrow; Everyone’s going XPU; Go beyond incidents to reliability
In #153 I mentioned Arm’s new hybrid training delivery model, where they have synchronous meetings for kickoff, Q&A sessions, and closing; but the bulk of...
RCT #157 - Leverage and reproducibility for increasing impact; Retrospective antipatterns; Prewiring; Becoming a lead-of-leads; UKAEA’s central RSE team; Transparent software telemetry
When I talk to team managers and leads, individually and in groups, I often say something along the lines of our mission, as RCD leads, is to advance science...
RCT #156 - Knowing what your strategy is; Introducing Manager, Ph.D.; UCL ARC on their 5-profession career ladders; Doing more with less; Aligning strategies; Project retrospectives; Building a relationship with your boss; Your leave document; Data migrations; Behavioural interviews; Turning Devs into DevOps-ers (or SREs)
Hi! A couple of reader replies from the last issue - here’s long-time reader Scott Delinger, CEO of Canadian regional academic HPC consortium Prairies DRI...
RCT #155 - Strat plans don't transplant; Hybrid work survey; Talking after mass shootings; Writing SOPs; Minimize WIP; Inclusive events; HPC Security draft
Hi, everyone! As you can see, I’m slowly getting back onto the regular newsletter schedule after coming back from my belated holidays trip. Thanks for you...
RCT #154 - Running a meeting effectively; Creating a team and a career ladder w/ Ian Cosden; Layoffs won’t make it easy to hire; US-RSE Group Leaders' Network; Core biomed open science practices; Matlab for Jupyter; Two years of Code For Thought"
Hi everyone - A quick request before we get started. I’m thinking of refactoring the newsletter a bit, pulling some things out into a separate email. It’d be...
Research Computing Teams #153, 28 Jan 2023
Hi! Last week I talked about the purpose of a meeting, and how for recurring catch-all meetings like team meetings, each agenda item might have its purpose....
Research Computing Teams #152, 22 Jan 2023
Hi! Sorry for today’s issue being late - I’ve just gotten back from my first trip since Feb 2020, a long-delayed trip to visit family. Travel was… fine?...
Research Computing Teams #151, 14 Jan 2023
Happy 2023, everyone! I hope you enjoyed the holidays and that the new year has been good to you so far. This will be a short newsletter while we all get...
Research Computing Teams #150, 17 Dec 2022
Your End-Of-Year Review You did great this year. I wanted to take some time to personally recognize the work you've put in during 2022. You have been a...
Research Computing Teams #149, 9 Dec 2022
I got a couple of emails about last weeks issue, asking about both communicating expectations and team processes. The most important, the most fundamental of...
Research Computing Teams #148, 3 Dec 2022
I was part of a discussion recently about a disengaged team member, and the topic of process vs expectations came up. I write and talk a lot about...
Research Computing Teams #147, 26 Nov 2022
I spent much of this week helping teach a small part of EMBL-EBI’s excellent Managing a Bioinformatics Core Facility course (Here’s the 2021 public...
Research Computing Teams #146, 19 Nov 2022
One of the things I wrestle with a bit with the newsletter is trying to cover the range of topics that research computing and data managers need to think...
Research Computing Teams #145, 12 Nov 2022
This week I did something a bit different: I interviewed Matthew Smith, ARC Research Systems Manager at the University of British Columbia. We had a great...
Research Computing Teams #144, 5 Nov 2022
title: “#144 - 5 Nov 2022” subtitle: “We can improve retention on our teams; Hacking your Bureaucracy; When Feedback Hurts; Your New Power Dynamics; Get...
Research Computing Teams #143, 28 Oct 2022
title: “#143 - 29 Oct 2022” subtitle: “Recruting means talking to people; Talkative people in quiet groups; Years of experience is a bad proxy; Working with...
Research Computing Teams #142, 22 Oct 2022
Issue #140 was controversial, but not for the reasons that I thought it might be. In the last two weeks I’ve had now had several people flat-out deny this...
Research Computing Teams #141, 15 Oct 2022
In #139, we talked about some general purpose first steps when taking on a new responsibility. Let’s talk about the other side of that, now — how to make...