A Year as an RSE

Just over a year ago, I started a new job.

Since 1 April 2020¹ I had worked as a postdoc in the EPAP group at King’s College London. It was a fantastic opportunity to research astro- and particle physics; to work with many excellent colleagues on Hyper-Kamiokande and SNEWS 2.0; and to travel the world for conferences and collaboration meetings. Over the coming years, however, I started to get restless. More and more, I noticed that I loved collaborating on open-source software more than any other parts of the job (except, perhaps, the travel)—and while I got to do this as a postdoc, I had very few options to advance in academia while staying focussed on software development.

Several unsuccessful fellowship applications and months of soul searching later, a KCL-internal newsletter advertised job opportunities in a brand new Research Software Engineering team. I jumped on the opportunity, applied despite some chaotic circumstances², aced the interview and got a job offer.

During the whole application process I was both excited and apprehensive.

On my first day, the head of the RSE group welcomed me at reception, gave me a quick tour of the office and then took me aside while we were grabbing coffee: “I wanted to check—how do I pronounce your name correctly?” I tell him. “Jost, okay. And your pronouns are they/them?” I confirm, quite surprised. “Yeah, I saw that in your email signature. We’ve already been using they/them internally when talking about you; but if we ever mess up, please do correct us!”³

And from that moment, I was certain I had made the right choice.

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After that, the first year was a bit of a blur.

Day two, I jumped in at the deep end and helped run an Intro to HPC course. I then did more teaching throughout the year, became a certified Software Carpentry instructor and started contributing to an intermediate course on Python optimisation.

I worked on projects ranging from cardiology to chemistry to internal tools for our larger e-Research group, all while continuing to contribute to astroparticle physics projects I’d worked on as a postdoc. I wrangled C++ build systems, made breakthroughs using NumPy’s array broadcasting, learned a lot about modern HTML/CSS/JS and explored complex PHP web frameworks. Through all that, I almost entirely got rid of the impostor syndrome I’d struggled with because I didn’t have any formal computer science training.

I started a book club with my colleagues. Joined the Society of RSE mentoring scheme, where Yo Yehudi was a fantastic mentor and helped me feel at home in the RSE community. Wrote an (unsuccessful, for now) funding proposal to start an RSE network across the Circle U university alliance, then a successful smaller-scale proposal for a collaboration between KCL and a single other institution.

I still got to travel—for RSE-related conferences like RSECon 2024 and FOSDEM 2025, of course, but also for physics-related events (a SNEWS 2.0 Hackathon and a DSNB workshop).

… and I did many, many more things.

My initial apprehension was completely unfounded. The atmosphere in our RSE group is warm and supportive. I get the benefits of working from home most of the time, but still look forward to the one day every week (or two), where I meet my colleagues in the office. I enjoy the variety of projects to work on and technologies to learn about.

I am certain: I have made the right choice.

1. What a time to start a new job! ↩︎
2. The application deadline was in the middle of a Hyper-K collaboration meeting where I would be in Japan. Since the run-up to these meetings is often quite busy, I wrote much of my cover letter at Shanghai airport, jet lagged and waiting for the connecting flight to Tokyo. Then I realised that, while I had a current CV, I’d have to rewrite much of it since it was tailored for academic positions in physics; so I rewrote my CV the following day, still jet lagged, in a hotel room in Toyama. ↩︎
3. And to this day, every single colleague in our RSE group has gotten my pronouns right every single time. ↩︎