Introducing Iain Stenson, RSE

Hello. I'm Iain, the newest recruit to the QMUL ITSR RSE team. We are the group of software engineers within ITS Research who help people at Queen Mary write readable, correct and high-performance research software.

I've taken the scenic route to research software engineering, having worked in telecoms network testing, crystallography and cancer research on the way. In that time, I've written C++, Java, Python and SQL for Linux, Windows and Android but, until recently, not for high performance clusters. I hope that my varied experience is going to complement that of my colleagues, Iain Barrass and Matthew Alexandrakis and I'm excited to learn from them both as they have long backgrounds in scientific computing.

In the next few months, I'm particularly looking forward to working on slow Python programs to speed them up with

cython, MPI and our HPC cluster, Apocrita. Python has some excellent unit testing libraries so I’m keen to talk test-driven development and continuous integration with anyone who’ll listen. If you're a researcher and you have software, Python or otherwise, that you would like some help with, you can get in touch with the team at our Slack workspace or by email.

Outside of work, you would normally find me at one of London’s many climbing walls. Since they aren't currently an option, you’ll sometimes catch me cycling the leafier roads of North London on my too-small but much loved road bike.

Overall, although starting in lockdown felt a little odd, the team are well set up for working from home and the nature of the work lends itself to it. While it would have been nice to meet my colleagues face to face, the combination of video calls for morning catchups, screen sharing when you can’t get something compiled/installed/configured and instant messaging for everything else has been a good alternative and will serve us well until we can safely return to campus.