Do you write software for research?
Update 08/03/16: there is now a St Andrews Research Computing Network mailing list
The Research Computing Team in the Library exists to support researchers across the University with the IT components of their research, including the development of software. However, we are aware that we aren’t the only people in the University developing software to support research, and nor can we be. What we don’t have is a clear sense of who else is developing such software, how many of them they are, how they’re distributed across the University or how well supported their work is. We’d like to reach out to anyone else who writes code in support of research in order to get a sense of what’s going on.
Maybe it’s your job to develop or maintain custom software for complex, ongoing research projects or maybe you just occasionally hack together scripts to automate part of your workflow. Perhaps you work with niche technologies, possibly requiring domain-specific expertise or knowledge of obscure legacy systems, or perhaps you work with PHP, SQL and JavaScript. You might write R scripts or markup. If any of this describes any part of your contribution to research at the University, we’d like to hear from you. If you think it describes any of your colleagues, please draw their attention to this post.
For the moment, we’d just like to know who you are, where you work and a rough idea of the coding that you do. If the response is good, we would like to follow up to get a better idea of what it’s like to develop software at St Andrews and if there are any reasonable steps which can be taken to improve that working environment. These may include enabling interaction with other developers, either virtually or at events. An awareness of the size and scope of the developer community at St Andrews will help us gauge the demand for and viability of providing a range of resources, from training to support systems.
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