relation of rsetoolkit to our hand-on scicomp course

[rkdarst]

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For some time, I have been developing https://handsonscicomp.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ as a map of important computing skills for scientists, to work the way up to being able to do scientific computing indepenently. Things are organized into levels, so that people can advance to the level they need, but not more.

This stuff is too basic to be considered a RSE toolkit, but instead is a toolkit for everyone who does computing. But still, I am interested in how we can avoid duplication of effort.

The point of this is that almost anything someone may need already exists out there somewhere, but there is information overload, and it is hard to know what is at an appropriate level for oneself.

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Benefit to the Research Software Engineering community
I image that this is more of pre-material, which is useful before one gets to the point of what would be contained here.

[jcohen02]

Hi @rkdarst, thanks for raising this is issue.

The Hands-on Scientific Computing course looks great and I can see a huge amount of work has gone into it.

We certainly don't want to duplicate effort and at the very least, we should find a way to clearly signpost the right group of potential learners who could benefit from your material to it.

There may, of course, be some much more practical ways we can link in with and promote people to consider using your material (and your other CodeRefinery courses as well as Software Carpentry courses and a wide variety of other RSE-related training material). Ultimately I think this very much depends on how the RSE Toolkit develops.

I think recent developments have slightly refocused things from the structure that is on the web page at present to something that is more of a resource that provides high-level advice along with links and guidance on where to find more information about issues that are likely to be important to RSEs. If RSEs have 3 or 4 "go-to resources" that they trust and know can help to point them to answers to key RSE-related questions (anything from careers to training to technical topics), I think our aim is to become one of those resources. How realistic that is, I'm not sure, but I hope that as a resource developed by and for the RSE community we can at least build a base of users of the resource who trust and also contribute to the information that is provided.

I really liked (and still like) the idea of the modular, pluggable rtk command line tool that could be used to set up best-practice-supporting environments for projects being undertaken in different languages, where individuals can contribute plugins that provide additional sub-commands to support different tools/languages, etc. However, I'm not sure how realistic this is and, perhaps more importantly, how it fits in with the intended structure of the toolkit based on more recent discussions.

Happy to discuss further how we can best highlight your existing resource(s) and provide complementary information here in the RSEToolkit but also avoid any significant duplication. We'd also very much appreciate any contributions you might be able to offer on helping us to shape the structure of the resource and develop its content.

[rkdarst]

Reading the above, I think there isn't so much overlap:

HoSC is the minimum needed to be a useful computational scientist (at different levels). It's not about specific tools one may need - for example, there are no Python/R mentions there. There's not really a particular order to learning these things, and we had them, they would be recommendations outside of the main flow. My feeling is that RSEToolkit would be more like this, perhaps focusing on advanced topics (though surely it would have some basics, too, but probably not organized in the same way, and more focused to medium users).

I think "one central place for reference" is a good idea. Right now there are lots of these websites, and I have no idea where to contribute (or even for some of them, how). But also, that could either be too much information or too constricted. Anyway, I probably won't be a driver here, but would try to contribute some when I have something to add.

The rtk tool seems interesting, but a different matter than this current issue (I think). But now I get the idea behind it.