Hi!

If you follow HPC twitter at all, you will have seen a heartfelt thread by a well-known research software developer, one who was a key contributor to the Singularity project among others, lamenting the frankly appalling state of developer productivity in HPC - both in what tools exist, and support for them (and other tools for developers) at academic centres. A lot of people chimed into the discussion, including one of the leading developers of the PetSC project, embedded software developers, some key people at big computing centres, all agreeing that there was a problem, but typically zooming in on one or another particular technical or procedural issue and not coming to any conclusion.

I think the issue is a lot bigger than HPC software development - it comes up in too many contexts to be about specific technical issues of running CI/CD pipelines on fixed infrastructure. The only people to identify the correct underlying issue, in my opinion, were people from the private sector, such as Brendan Bouffler from AWS:

Too much reliance on ‘free’ labour - postgrads and postdocs, who, invariably, decide that burning their time being mechanical turks for their ‘superiors’ just sucks, so they come and work for us. And since we pay $, we’re not gonna waste them on things software can do.

Hi!

A reader from a U15 research institution [Canadian research-intensive universities; think Russell Group in the UK, or R1 universities in the US] writes in to describe expanding their research computing team with unconventional roles:

First, a grant advisor, specifically to assist PIs in writing sane tech inclusions in their grants. You may have reviewed grant proposals where the medical science, particle physics, quantum chemistry, etc. is very clear, and then the explanation of the computational aspects and the equipment justification sounds like Dilbert’s boss wrote it. That is precisely what this position is intended to improve, but also sitting on internal panels that judge Innovation Fund proposal maturities before they’re allowed to apply, etc. Second, a Communities of Interest Coordinator, who will foster and support research communities of like-minded graduate students, PDFs, etc. around research fields making use of computation—bioinformatics, AI, digital humanities—or around digital research tools—R, Julia, MATLAB, Gaussian, etc. By supporting communities of interest, these groups can become shared knowledge hubs, where newbies can find guidance or “the ropes” and experienced but stuck researchers can find inspiration or “an ear” that might enable them to unstick. Both positions have been filled internally and start in December. More traditional ARC job descriptions are being written up now as part of a further expansion.

I love this! It’s a long-standing tenet of this newsletter that research computing is much more than just technology. It’s teams, it’s communities, it’s product management - it’s people. Connecting researchers and their more directly to the computation, software, and data resources that can advance their work — whether that means in grant writing or capacity building within a practitioner community — is very much part of the our broad remit in research computing and data.

Hi, everyone:

It’s been a good week here at RCT world headquarters.

First, our team finally published our paper describing our v1 platform at a high level - a mere 29 months after creating the first version’s Google Doc. The effort tied together years of not just software development and technical architecture but stakeholder engagement, privacy considerations, team building, and domain knowledge. Several co-authors were software developers who had never been on a paper before, were pretty new to the whole process, and hadn’t necessarily appreciated the “full stack” of the effort. It was fun to help them be part of the process not just of writing a paper but of creating a piece of the scientific record of humanity. Knowing they’ll be able to walk into many University libraries all over the world, for decades, and find a copy of it in the stacks, with their name on it, with authorship and citation records kept basically in perpetuity, is pretty cool.

Secondly, on a personal note, I spent some time at an arm HPC hackathon, which was both exciting (new tech! With many different systems to play with!) and surprising (Oracle’s cloud seems… pretty ok?). But more importantly it was really rewarding to see that after a probably eight year hiatus from day-to-day performance tuning of HPC codes, some of the names and tools may have changed, but a basic understanding of the tradeoffs at play and the techniques used to balance between those tradeoffs translate unscathed and can be put to use immediately. These are fundamental skills.

Hi, research computing team managers and leaders:

In our team there’s been a lot of passages lately - a paper for our original work is (finally!) coming out, as our new version is (finally!) coming together; we’re gearing up for a new batch of co-ops as our current co-ops are starting to document and getting ready to present their work; a project manager is joining the team for the first time now that the effort has reached a size and scope that it needs one (well, it needed one a year ago, but here we are).

These passages - and especially the influx of new people, new tasks, new scope - are really important for a team’s well being. Stasis isn’t stable; systems, including systems of people, are either growing or stagnating.

In academia sometimes it’s far too easy for groups to become very comfortable with “the way we do things”, and set in their ways. As Boulanger points out in the first article in the roundup, that can quickly lead to problems not being addressed - or even really noticed any more - and eventually people both within the team and “clients” of the team starting to drift away. In fact, I was talking to a colleague this week about one group’s services becoming ossified to the point where consumers of those services started moving to those of a different and newer group - the first group didn’t take feedback or feature requests seriously, and now there’s a real chance it will simply be disbanded (or, maybe worse, left go on indefinitely with less and less actual purpose).

Hi!

At least one other research group has also taken to providing some interview questions ahead of time. In response to the discussion in last issue, Titus Brown wrote in on twitter:

Hi!

So, two final aspects of our recent hiring situation that I haven’t had room to mention earlier: we’re giving out interview questions ahead of time, and interacting with peer teams is still hard in this hybrid/remote world.

The first of the two is likely more surprising and/or controversial. We’ve changed a bit how we’re hiring, including sending out some key interview questions ahead of time. This was initiated by a team member, interviewing co-op students. I was initially pretty skeptical, until I attended the resulting interviews; the discussions were so much better, and went so much deeper, that I wanted to keep trying it. Our initial attempts with interns went well enough that we’ve hired our first contract staff member using this approach too (and sent a pretty detailed ).

Hi!

I wanted to give you an update on the co-op hiring mini-fiasco from last week.

Even with the chaos, we still managed to get 3 of our top 4 candidates, because we still have a great team, a sensible set of interview questions, we contacted candidates (just!) before the interview, and followed up afterwards.

Let me tell you about a mini-fiasco this week that was entirely my own doing.

In our team, we routinely hire students for semester-long co-op positions. It happens three times a year - I think we’ve taken part 12 times over the past five years. It generally works out pretty well, for us and the co-op student.

The process is pretty uneventful generally. Our tireless administrative staff, without whom the place would fall apart, lets me know that it’s time again; we post our usual job ad; we interview some students and submit a ranked list. We’ve lately been pretty good at having projects ready for them on day one.

We had a couple more potential student supervisors with projects this semester, which is good. In the past year we’ve been upping our game at hiring full time staff, and part of that is better job ads; so we wrote a much better job ad for the co-op position this year and that resulted in fewer candidates but who were overall better matches for the team. Win-win!

Happy October!

There’s a couple of articles in the roundup this week on professional development and career paths for those in research computing & data - and one of them even emphasizes professional development for managers.

We have a long way to go, but there’s widespread recognition that our profession needs to grow, and slowly growing recognition about the resources that will take. Even, finally, for us managers or team leads.

The weird truth is that the research world greatly undervalues training - it’s just expected that everyone will learn on their own. But from what resources, for research computing and data management? And when are we supposed to take the time to learn? We still need some help.

Hi - I hope your week has gone well!

I’ve been prompted by a few things to think about activity versus accomplishing lately.

Falling into a trap of doing stuff, and so feeling busy and industrious, but not actually getting anything meaningful accomplished is certainly a trap that individual contributors can get ensnared in. We’ve all worked with someone (“or been someone”, he said sheepishly) prone to bike shedding or yak-shaving or some other flavour of spinning around in a rabbit hole without making forward progress. (Whenever I have to explain yak-shaving to someone, is the youtube video I point them to). It can like work to the IC, but to an external observer it’s pretty clear they’re stuck - they were tasked with doing the thing and they are very visibly not taking the direct route towards doing the thing.

Hi!

We’ve talked here in several issues about the “great resignation” that many companies are seeing as the pandemic starts to wane a bit. I think this is playing out differently in our world; there are definitely people leaving, or making new work arrangements, but it’s less en masse. Rather than having trouble with people leaving, instead, it seems to be more of an (even bigger) problem bringing people on.

On the there have been academic positions open since late winter, some that have been re-posted an uncomfortable number of times. That’s for manager positions; I’m also hearing from a lot of people that hiring ICs is getting almost impossibly difficult.

Research computing and data is increasingly a single discipline, a single area of practice. It’s a complex one, too; one which includes the support of first tentative steps which themselves may be research activities, all the way through to production operations of routine infrastructure.

You can read more, or go straight on to the roundup.

There was a on twitter (it happens) about software as a facility, as a tool for enabling research rather than merely as a research output itself.

Quick: what’s your team’s specialty?

Your team’s specialty is its reputation for what it’s good at. Not what you think your team is good at; what matters is what specific thing your stakeholders (funders, clients, institutional decision makers) think your specialty is. What they recommend you for to peers, what they recommend funding you for to decision makers.

In the post-pandemic world, researchers are used to getting their support remotely from anywhere. To compete, your team will need well-defined specialties; and “HPC” or “research software development” isn’t a specialty.

Hi, everyone:

I hope that as the start of the academic year approaches in the northern hemisphere, those of you who are going back to campus are comfortable doing so, and supported by administration.

Thanks to community members volunteering, we have a small core of 4-5 people who will start helping with resources for the community making suggestions to guide the newsletter. If you have suggestions, or want to take part, just hit reply or email me.

Thanks, everyone, for your responses last week.

I’ve been thinking a lot about strategy in other contexts lately - some of you will have noticed that I’ve been back on my nonsense on twitter, about the importance of having a focus. The very insightful comments and suggestions you sent last week about how we can help more research computing teams were very on point, and I think combine to a feasible strategy.

Because within this newsletter community we’ve built together, we have a number of strengths:

Hi, all:

So the last newsletter resonated quite a bit (welcome to new members of the Research Computing Teams community)! It was a bit of a cri de coeur about research computing’s inferiority complex that comes from unfairly comparing ourselves to both research and tech industry computing, and - to my mind - explains why we don’t advocate as well for ourselves as we could, support each other as well as we could, and why too often we don’t hold ourselves to high enough standards. It’s easy enough to see some of the results; poorly supported and run teams, not enough of institutional backing, demoralized team members, people leaving or checking out.

Research computing and data, as a community, has an inferiority complex. And it’s a problem.

This week I saw yet another press release - I won’t link to it, there’s no point in calling out this University or team in particular, it’s not like they’re sole offenders here - about how their new HPC cluster would “transform research”. Look — no it won’t. What would that even mean? Transform it into what? A biscuit? Rugby?

The infuriating thing here is that by all accounts, this was a good and useful procurement. Not only did it increase capacity (even if not to the “capacity knows no bounds” limit specified in the press release) but also the range of capabilities, with heterogenous nodes and a more flexible scheduler. That mean the existing researchers will have access to more resources, and it looks like it’ll be easier to provide support to a wider range of researchers, including those whose needs weren’t being met before.

Hi there:

We’re going into a long weekend here in Toronto - the second-to-last one of the summer - and it’s very much needed. We have a number of pretty ambitious efforts we’re working on, and it’s been a long year already. I hope that you and your team are taking care of yourself, and that you in particular as manager or team lead are taking some time off. There’s an article below on the importance - both for you and your team - of you taking some time off, to recharge yourself and give your team the opportunity to step up.

Also, there was some interest in the AWS ARM HPC hackathon that was in the roundup last week. I know that a number of readers are, like me, in the genomics space right now. Let me know if you think you or your team might be interested in participating in a similar week-long hackathon for ARM specifically around genomics; as always, just hit “reply” if you get this in your email, or email jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org if you want to talk about that or about anything that comes up in the newsletter.

And on to the roundup:

Hi, all:

Success as a manger is defined by a lot of hard work and tough conversations that will pay off over very long timescales. It’s way less immediately gratifying than deploying a new feature or making the CI/CD dashboard lights all green again.

Success or possible success for me this week week: I think I managed to convince some stakeholders to not make a bad and limiting data-related decision which would have limited the scientific effort of a four-year effort; and I’m coaching some team members to take on increasing planning and coordination responsibilities, with an eye towards gauging their interest and current ability towards being leads themselves, over a process which will likely take months. Small steps, tough conversations (there’ll be a lot of feedback conversations about effectiveness in the new responsibilities - many giving positive feedback, but not all), long term payoff.

Hi, everyone:

I hope you’re doing well.

I’ve neglected the “managing your own career” section lately, which I’m going to try to fix; we spend a lot of time here talking about helping our team members develop their skills, which is good and we certainly have an important role to play there, but we have to look after our own careers as well. Luckily in the past week several very relevant articles have crossed my browser, and so I present for you this week an attempt to bring that back into balance a bit.

Are there particular things you’re doing to track your own career progress, or get ready for future next steps? Are their particular gaps you’re not sure how to address or questions about how to progress? Please feel free to email me at jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org or just hit reply, and I’ll answer as best as I can and with your permission ask the newsletter readership to chime in, too.

Hi, everyone!

I hope you’re having a good weekend, and that the past week was good for you and your team.

I’m working (with some help) on tidying up and improving the material from the hiring and performance management series from the newsletter at the start of the year; I’d like to turn those into expanded and more coherent writeups that can help other research computing team leaders (or those interested in becoming one). Other topics that came up when last I asked for suggestions were:

Hi, all!

Here our team is continuing to make post-pandemic plans for how work will work.

Others are further ahead. This week Apple confirmed their very office-centric plans, and similar plans came up again. Apple, which is very much a product company relying on close integration of the work of software, hardware, industrial design, and even materials science teams, very dramatically doubled down on its office-based approach - with a surprisingly flexible (for Apple) approach of allowing up to two days a week remote for some teams, and an unsurprisingly (for Apple) inflexible approach of firing people who leaked internal Apple discussions to the world. Asana is requiring even more on-site time, 4 days a week (the 5th day being their long-held tradition of no-meetings Wednesdays), but with increased flexibility in working hours and conditions.

Hi there, everyone!

It’s been a busy week here of contacting recommended potential job candidates, building consensus among stakeholders, debugging code, and juggling finances - a normal set of activities in research computing management land, where if we’re very lucky we got some training in maybe one of those things.

I’m starting to see some out-of-office notifications in response to newsletter issues, which genuinely delights me - it’s been a long 16 months and we all deserve a break. I hope that those who haven’t managed to take significant time off in a while get the opportunity over the summer or fall.

I also had a very nice conversation this past week with one reader; we’re looking into one possibility for a community forum (which might make unnecessary a revisit of the “Ask Managers Anything” feature from last year), and toying with the idea of community video chats. I’m pretty excited about how a couple of those things might work.

Hi!

I’m back and refreshed from my mini-break from the newsletter; there’s a lot of optimism in the air here as COVID-19 numbers continue to drop and projects are moving forwards.

I don’t have a lot else to add right now, so let’s go straight to the roundup!

Managing Teams

Hi, everyone!

Mainly taking the week off from the newsletter this week (for positive reasons - some family celebrations); things will return to normal next week. But there were some things I wanted to share with you.

First, on the discussion from last week of planning for hybrid distributed/local work, we heard from long-time reader Adam DeConinck about what he’s learned:

Hi, everyone:

We have several items this week about post pandemic management and continuing to manage a distributed team.

It’s hard to hire and retain excellent staff in research computing, particularly (but not only!) in academia. We can’t offer FAANG-type salaries or perks, and if we’re even trying to compete on those terms we’re doomed. Our only option is to play to every advantage we do have: challenging, meaningful work; flexibility in work (which has always been a perk of academic environments); strong benefit plans; stability of employment; ability to support wide ranges of interesting projects; and clear and up-front staff salary bands (making wide disparities between people hired into the same jobs less likely). And we can play to those strengths while doing our best to attract the kinds of candidates want to have real impact on research, feel part of a research and education community, value learning new things and working in new areas, and who intend to occupy a job long enough that the benefits we do often offer (like pensions) matter.

Hi, all:

I think I helped a team find the courage (and the organizational support) to say “no” to things this week.

Strategy for research computing teams is hard. I’ve sort of given up on trying to find strategy articles for the roundup that are suitable for us; most are for either large organizations with many moving parts which make no sense in our context, or for tech product strategy. The product strategy ones start off okay, but they really imagine being able to pivot products to very different markets, and that doesn’t work well for our super-specialized tools. We’re not normally going to be able to take an unsuccessful piece of software for geophysical applications and pivot it into a digital humanities platform. We work as part of the research “market”, not outside of it, and “finding product-market fit” for our individual products isn’t the problem.

Hi, everyone!

This week’s RCT Newsletter is a little slow going out; the reason ties into something I’ve been meaning to write a bit more about, usual research funding grants vs nonprofit grants and what research computing and data teams can learn from that. (Or you can go straight to the roundup).

Any funder has things they want to accomplish, and the goal as a potential fundee is to find something in the intersection of “work that helps the funder accomplish their goals” and “work that we are able to do and that is aligned with our goals”. Excellent work that isn’t in that first set won’t get funding. Money attached to work that isn’t in the second set is at best a distraction, at worst drains your teams’ credibility.

Hi, all:

I got an important question and comment from longtime newsletter reader Laura Kinkead at University of Zurich:

Do you have any recommendations for online management or leadership courses? My manager has given me the go head to take a course or two, and I’m wondering if you have any recommendations for what may be more or less relevant to the research environment. If it would help to be more specific, an area that I’d like to focus on is coaching and giving feedback.

Hi, all:

I hope you’re enjoying the change of seasons. The end of April here brings an onslaught of deadlines, meetings, and events, but things are settling back down now.

Details of the basecamp fiasco continue to come out. As the raw signal folks , discomfort as a leader isn’t inherently bad or a signal of a problem. It’s not our lot as leaders to be comfortable about everything. Listen to your team, even - especially! - when you don’t love what you’re hearing.

Hi, everyone!

If you paid any attention to tech management twitter at all in the past week, you heard about how Basecamp started the week by announcing - in a public blogpost! - a new internal policy about how all committees in the company including the new DEI committee was disbanded, and how politics was now forbidden from discussion inside Basecamp or on official accounts, and how it ended the week with 30% of their 50-some-odd company leaving.

I swore I wouldn’t get drawn into that morass for the newsletter, because “managers behaving badly” isn’t the beat I want to be on - it’s depressing, plentiful, and frankly there’s precious little new to be learned from any given episode. There’s a million ways that managers can do things poorly, with many fewer to do things right, and helping managers do things right is where I want this newsletter to be.

But the actual underlying story of what ended up being being so mundane, so petty, and such an easy trap to fall into I kind of feel like it’s worth addressing.

Hi, everyone!

I have a somewhat short newsletter for you this week; exciting things are happening at work with product adoption and hiring, both of which are taking up a lot of time but are unmistakably good. In addition, we’re having increasingly lovely weather, dear friends are getting vaccinated, and actions and decisions made months ago are are finally appearing in outcomes that are beginning to come together in a pleasingly coherent manner. I hope you, yours, and your team are doing equally well.

For now, on to the roundup!

Managing Teams

Hi, everyone:

Thanks for your comments about earlier hiring and feedback posts. I’m taking those responses and getting some help pulling those together, incorporating the input, adding more material, and putting into some kinds of coherent wholes that can be made more widely available (like the getting started with one-on-ones material). As always, I appreciate your comments, questions, suggestions, and feedback - please always feel free to hit reply or email me at jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org at any time.

For now, the roundup!

Hi, everyone:

I hope you’ve been well; I’ve had a short week with a 4-day Easter long weekend. Between being recharged for the weekend, and finally having a couple of days of work where I could focus on high-leverage activities - hiring discussions for our team and pushing forward a hiring process at an organizational level; writing a document useful in itself but also that will be a model for team members to write others in the future; getting two teams aligned and getting them to find a really good solution to a shared design problem - it’s been a really good week.

It took me a long time to re-orient myself to understanding what “a good day’s work” looks like for a manager. Everything is so much more direct and quicker-feedback as an individual contributor; the thing works or it doesn’t. As a manager, quick wins are few and far between - and you can only be really sure you made the right decision months after making it. So having two or three good managerial days in a row is a nice feeling and a good way to wind down a week.

I hope you’re having similar success.

Hi there - if this is a long weekend for you, I hope you’re enjoying it.

Last time we spoke a little bit about expectations, and routine feedback to team members and peers when those expectations are met or not met. This time, let’s consider - or skip to the roundup.

Feedback is a mechanism to align expectations with your team members in the moment, and to encourage meeting those expectations in the future. Sometimes those expectations were explicit; other times, they were implicit and it’s a helpful way of making them explicit. This is a simple, extremely useful and scandalously underused tool, particularly in research environments. What’s more, your team members want feedback. Do you want more feedback from your manager about how you’re doing? Why do you think your team members feel differently than you do?

Hi, all!

Last issue, I left you with a couple of models for giving feedback. We had Situation-Behaviour-Impact:

“When you presented the proposed plan at the project kickoff meeting, the material you presented had a really good balance of just enough relevant context and case for the plan overview. That helped ensure the discussion afterwards was well informed and not sidetracked into irrelevant details.”

The Manager-Tools model:

Hi, everyone:

This week I want to talk a little bit about giving routine feedback to team members; or you can skip to the roundup.

I mentioned that I find thinking about team members performance in terms of expectations clarifying. That’s more obvious when talking about longer-term goal setting or performance reviews - here are our expectations for the next quarter/year, and then those expectations were met, or not - but I think it’s especially useful when thinking of more immediate on individual tasks.

Hi, everyone -

Here in Toronto we’re enjoying the traditional season of “False Spring”, where a burst of warm weather and blue skies lures the unwary into putting away winter coats - but even so it’s cheering and encouraging, and spirits everywhere are notably lifted.

I’m going to write a little bit about performance management in the next three newsletters. I have a brief introduction to my preferred philosophy of performance management below (or skip to the roundup); in the next issue we’ll talk a bit about short-term performance management (feedback) in the following we’ll talk about longer-term performance (goal-setting and review), and finally we’ll talk about what happens if people are or aren’t consistently meeting expectations.

Hi!

It’s been a big week here - we finally got a long-awaited paper submitted, attended one virtual conference, and are gearing up for another.

I hope you and your team has had successes this week too - are there any you want to share? If so, or if you have any feedback, suggestions, ideas, or questions, let me know - reply, or send me something at jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org.

For now, on to the roundup!

Hi, all!

Thanks for your responses to last newsletter. Readers who responded were broadly pretty happy with the all-in-one newsletter, even if gets a little long; topics that were of interest for future write-ups were (in order of number of votes):

• Performance management

Hi, everyone:

I hope you’re doing well! I have two questions for you.

This week kind of got away from me - it’s been an exciting couple of weeks, with two new team members joining and our project getting ready to take on new responsibilities - but it means that the final instalment on research computing hiring will be delayed until next week.

So I’ll ask two question that I was going to ask at the end of the series.

Hi!

So you’ve got a list of hiring requirements written up - the next step is to think about how to evaluate candidates against the requirements. That’s next, or you can skip ahead to the roundup.

Once you have a pretty clear list of job requirements and a sketched out job description that the team members and other stakeholders have agreed on, the next step, before even a job ad, is to figure out how you will evaluate candidates against the job description.

Hi!

I hope you’re having a good week. Below is the continuation of our discussion on hiring, stemming in part from the more formalized pipeline that we’re working on; you can also skip to the roundup.

Last week I started with the basic premise - you have a hypothesis that you’ve found a good candidate (and they have a hypothesis that your team would be a good match for them). Then, as scientists, the nob is to disprove the hypothesis.

Hi!

The good news is that my team, and the larger organization I’m a part of, is going to be growing substantially in the coming year. That’s also the bad news. We have to hire.

Hiring team members is a time-consuming, exhausting job - and probably rightly so, since it’s the most important thing we do. A lot of planning, organizational, and process mistakes we make as managers can be mitigated if we’ve helped assemble a terrific team; on the other hand there’s only so much pulling on those same levers can help us if we’ve made poor hiring choices. Your research computing team members are the people who do the work of supporting research with working code, data curation/analysis/systems, or computing systems. Putting that time and effort into hiring that makes it time consuming and tiring is absolutely appropriate.

Hiring, like anything else in management, is a practice that you can improve on by having a process you go through that you learn from and improve each time through. That means being a lot more deliberate about hiring (or really any other aspect of management) than we usually are in academia-adjacent areas. It’s also, to be honest, more work. But hiring is the most important decision you’ll make as a manager. Decisions you make about new team members will last even after you leave. A good hiring choice will make everyone’s job easier, and a poor hiring choice will make everyone’s job worse.

Hi, all!

This is the last part of the stop doing things challenge - the change management of actually stopping doing something. Or you can skip straight to the roundup.

The hardest thing about stopping doing things, of course, isn’t the identifying what things to stop doing, but actually stopping and staying stopped doing them.

Hi, all:

Most of us are now well and truly back into the swing of things; I hope you and your team are doing well.

Skip to the roundup

Hi!

Happy New Year, everyone. I hope you had some time over the holidays to rest and recuperate. A lot of us have discovered that it wasn’t enough - we’re still dragging - but we’re less tired than before, research needs us and our teams, and so we’re back into it.

An awful lot of early January writing always advocates for people to start something new - develop a new useful habit, start learning a new skill, make time for other important activities.

Those can be great! But we only have so much time in the day, and to add something useful to our routine we have to drop something else, especially with our and our teams energy levels still low. To add a new high priority effort we need to de-prioritize - possibly to zero - something else.

Congratulations, everyone; we did it.

If you’re at a University, 2020 is now or is soon to be officially at a close. For the rest of us, while there is some work remaining to be done, things are winding down. We made it to the end of 20-frickin’-20.

I started this newsletter together with you in January, which seems like a decade ago. It’s been a hard year for our teams, and a hard year for managers. We’ve had to keep things together and moving with the world falling apart; help team members through incredibly tough times and keep the research and researchers who depend on us going.

We’ve done incredible work, and because of what we’ve done as managers our teams are going to come out in late 2021 stronger than when this started. The trust we’ve built with our teams by seeing them through the tough times will make the team work even better together. Our improving and making more intentional our team communications, necessary for the abrupt move to all-distributed, will be of benefit in the years to come. Our upping our management and prioritization skills will help our team through whatever future challenges come our way.

Research Computing Teams Link Roundup, 11 Dec 2020

Hi, everyone!

I don’t have anything of my own to share with you this issue, but it’s been an interesting week in research computing and so there’s lots of nuggets in the link roundup.

As always, if you find anything particularly interesting, or if there are topics you’d like covered, please let me know! Feedback is a gift, and even though I’ve been shamefully slow getting back to a couple of readers this week I really value your thoughts. I enjoy getting email back, even about things that you don’t like or disagree with.

Hi, everyone:

There were two big stories in the news this week about what’s possible with sustained research infrastructure funding and what happens when research infrastructure isn’t sustained.

In the first, you’ve probably read about AlphaFold, Google Brain’s efforts to bring deep learning to protein folding. It did very well in the 14th annual Critical Assessment of (protein) Structure Prediction (CASP) contest. Predictably but unfortunately, Google’s press releases wildly overhyped the results - “Protein Folding Solved”.