My guest is John Stevenson from the British Geological Survey (BGS) and there is a lot to cover in this episode: John's switch from science to engineering; how to move from proprietary to open source software - and the hot stuff: volcanos. And what John did in volcanology.

Here are a few links:

• https://www.bgs.ac.uk/people/stevenson-john/ John's profile at the BGS
• https://volcanologistsoutsideacademia.wordpress.com/2018/08/29/spotlight-john-a-stevenson-ph-d/
• https://all-geo.org/volcan01010/every-post-ever/ John's blog posts
• https://fosstodon.org/@volcan01010 John's profile on Mastodon
• https://github.com/volcan01010/ GitHub for John
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Kübler-Ross a reference for the 5 stages of grief

Volcanos

• https://icelandicvolcanos.is Iceland has a lot of volcanos
• https://rischi.protezionecivile.gov.it/en/volcanic/volcanoes-italy/ Volcanos in Italy
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_eruptions_of_Eyjafjallajökull the big eruption from 2010
• http://www.pompeii.org.uk/s.php/tour-the-two-letters-written-by-pliny-the-elder-about-the-eruption-of-vesuvius-in-79-a-d-history-of-pompeii-en-238-s.htm the letters by Pliny the Younger describing the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD

Tools mentioned

• https://www.sonatype.com
• https://qgis.org
• https://www.geopackage.org
• https://merginmaps.com
• https://www.redhat.com/en
• https://www.debian.org
• https://www.centos.org
• https://thehackernews.com/2024/04/malicious-code-in-

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie
• US RSE Slack (usrse.slack.com): @Peter Schmidt
• Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@code4thought or @code4thought@fosstodon.org
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

How can you transition from photo-type or exploratory research software to production code? Can you? I've been discussing this with my guest Duncan McGregor. In the first part of our discussion we touch on how you can effectively analyse large data sets that are distributed over different locations with tools like Dask.

Links:

• https://www.youtube.com/@PairingWithDuncan Duncan's YouTube channel
• https://www.oneeyedmen.com Duncan's website
  • https://github.com/dmcg and his GitHub
• https://www.dask.org Dask
  • https://github.com/aws-solutions-library-samples/distributed-compute-on-aws-with-cross-regional-dask cross regional programming with Dask
  • https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/build-efficient-cross-regional-i-o-intensive-workloads-with-dask-on-aws/
  • https://blog.dask.org/2022/07/19/dask-multi-cloud
• https://zarr.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ Zarr format
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetCDF NetCDF
• https://www.ecmwf.int European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts
  • https://github.com/ecmwf
  • https://www.eumetsat.int
• https://pangeo.io
• https://testbook.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ Unit testing with Jupyter
  • https://github.com/nteract/testbook

Conferences/Events:

• https://dhrse2025.er.kcl.ac.uk King's College London: summer school for digital humanities. 30 June - 4 July, London
• https://www.software.ac.uk/workshop/collaborations-workshop-2025-cw25 The annual Collaborations Workshop of the Software Sustainability Institute UK, 13-15 May, University of Sterling, Scotland
• https://www.helmholtz-hirse.de/events/2025_06_13-rsehpcatisc.html The RSE workshop (13 June) at the IS

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie
• US RSE Slack (usrse.slack.com): @Peter Schmidt
• Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@code4thought or @code4thought@fosstodon.org
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

English Edition: In this last episode for the ByteSized RSE "miniseries" we talk about AI assisted coding - and the (long) history how engineers tried to come up with assisting tools to make our code better and more robust. My guest is Liam Gao from Imperial College, London, UK.

Links:

• https://github.com/features/copilot GitHub Co-Pilot
• https://huggingface.co HuggingFace another AI tool
• https://spacelift.io/blog/ai-coding-assistant-tools a summary of current tools (non exhaustive)
• https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/prompt-engineering OpenAI's take on prompt engineering
  • https://www.promptingguide.ai
• https://web.archive.org/web/20121022091418/http://www.stanford.edu/~learnest/spelling.pdf some of the attempts to come up with spelling checks
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_completion
• https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ Good old Emacs
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi_(text_editor) vi editor (not for the faint hearted)
• https://winworldpc.com/product/turbo-pascal/7x Borland's Turbo Pascal with IDE
• https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/ Stackoverflow survey from 2024 with ca 65000 respondents

And here the YouTube clips mentioned

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvEXkd3O2ow Cypher musing why he didn't take the "blue pill"
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0mRMp2kbQY Star Trek TNG, S3E6 - Geordie LaForge talking to the computer

Get in touch

Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören!

Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt:

• Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org
• UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie
• US RSE Slack (usrse.slack.com): @Peter Schmidt
• Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@code4thought or @code4thought@fosstodon.org
• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)
  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile)

This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/