[SOFÍA]: Hello, and welcome to Code for Thought, the podcast about software for research and the people who create it.
[SOFÍA]: I'm Sofía Miñano, and today I have the pleasure of taking Peter's seat for this special Spanish-language edition of the podcast.
[SOFÍA]: For many of our Spanish-speaking listeners, the term Research Software Engineer, or RSE,
[SOFÍA]: may sound like something new.
[SOFÍA]: In many countries there is no official job title for those who apply software development to academic research.
[SOFÍA]: However, software is increasingly prevalent in research, from the sciences to the humanities.
[SOFÍA]: And as the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) says, good software is fundamental to good research.
[SOFÍA]: Because of this need, in more and more parts of the world it's possible to work as a programmer or engineer within the academic or scientific world.
[SOFÍA]: Today we're talking with Carlos Gavidia Calderón, a Research Software Engineer at the Alan Turing Institute, the United Kingdom's national institute for artificial intelligence, who will tell us what this profession is like, how one can get into it, and how he sees the role of RSEs in Latin America.
[CARLOS]: Hi Sofía, delighted to be here.
[SOFÍA]: Hi Carlos, how nice to talk with you.
[SOFÍA]: To start, I wanted to talk a bit about what an RSE is and what they do.
[SOFÍA]: Diego Alonso Álvarez, who is the head of the RSE group at Imperial, gave a really good talk at the beginning of our seminar of RSE talks in Spanish,
[SOFÍA]: about what an RSE is and how the role is understood at universities in the UK.
[SOFÍA]: How would you describe this profession?
[CARLOS]: Basically, research software engineer — I think it's in the name, right?
[CARLOS]: A software engineer who works in the field of scientific research, in academia.
[CARLOS]: Many years ago I worked in industry, at an insurance company, and I remember that my colleagues, engineers like me, computer scientists, knew more about the policies than the insurance people themselves, the ones who sell the product, right?
[CARLOS]: And I think something of that — I mean, when you, as a computer engineer, work in a domain, knowing the domain helps you a lot.
[CARLOS]: And I think that's the added value that we — I'm going to use the English acronym, sorry — that we RSEs bring to projects, right?
[CARLOS]: We're computer scientists, but ones who know about science, so we can have much more impact, much faster, than a computer scientist who doesn't know about it.
[SOFÍA]: Okay, okay.
[SOFÍA]: So, from your point of view, the main advantage is... Sometimes it's called domain knowledge, right?
[SOFÍA]: Knowledge of the field you're working in.
[CARLOS]: That's right.
[CARLOS]: And it also happens on the technical side, you know?
[CARLOS]: For example, I remember that when I worked in industry years and years ago, I knew Java.
[CARLOS]: I was a Java guy.
[SOFÍA]: You were a Java guy.
[CARLOS]: I was a Java guy, that's right.
[CARLOS]: And that had value.
[CARLOS]: Since it was Java, a very popular language in industry, there was demand.
[CARLOS]: When I made the jump to academia, well, Java isn't so popular.
[SOFÍA]: Right, so the technologies that are used and the skills that are required also vary a bit between academia and industry.
[CARLOS]: For example, lately Julia is very popular in scientific projects, but I don't think any bank or insurance company works with Julia these days.
[SOFÍA]: I know someone who's employed programming in Julia, and I always tell him he must be one of the 50 in the world.
[SOFÍA]: So... Yeah.
[CARLOS]: Does he work in industry or academia?
[SOFÍA]: He's at a startup.
[SOFÍA]: So it's a bit... Yeah, it's like a startup that...
[SOFÍA]: Actually, they do quite a lot of research.
[SOFÍA]: It's like research in industry, but yeah, at a startup.
[CARLOS]: No, but I think if you go into industry, you're better off knowing Python than knowing Julia,
[CARLOS]: I'd venture to say.
[SOFÍA]: Okay, okay, interesting.
[SOFÍA]: Cool, well, tell us a bit more about your current work.
[SOFÍA]: What software projects are you working on now at the Turing?
[SOFÍA]: Can you tell us a bit?
[CARLOS]: Ah, of course, of course, of course.
[CARLOS]: I've been on a project called CVD-Net for almost two years now.
[CARLOS]: And with CVD-Net the goal is that, over five years, we want to make a prototype of what a digital twin of the cardiovascular system is.
[CARLOS]: In the spirit of our talks, I'm not going to say "digital twin," I'm going to say "gemelo digital."
[CARLOS]: And the digital twin is basically a personalized computational model.
[CARLOS]: I mean, we can make a computational model of Sofía's lungs and heart, and with this model we can predict how your health is going to evolve over time and whether some medication will improve it or not.
[CARLOS]: So, well, the project is quite large.
[CARLOS]: We have postdocs, postdoctoral researchers.
[CARLOS]: They do the development of the digital twin, the modeling.
[CARLOS]: They're people who know about anatomy, who know about medicine.
[CARLOS]: Unlike me, I'm a computer scientist.
[CARLOS]: But my contribution goes two ways in the project.
[CARLOS]: To make this digital twin, they need patient data.
[CARLOS]: Data from patients and from clinical studies.
[CARLOS]: Now, this data is sensitive.
[CARLOS]: You don't want your health information to show up on, I don't know, Reddit or YouTube.
[CARLOS]: So what we do is we give the researchers a computational environment in the cloud, basically, where they can work, and there are safeguards that prevent, for example, you from uploading the data to your email.
[SOFÍA]: Uh-huh, okay, okay.
[CARLOS]: And the other thing is that, well, I mean, these are scientists, they write their code on their laptop, in their Jupyter Notebook, but the idea is to turn that into a tool that a doctor
[CARLOS]: can use to interact with their patients.
[CARLOS]: We build that too.
[CARLOS]: The researchers give us the model and we make a pipeline — I don't know how you say it in Spanish, but a pipeline, a flow — that goes from the clinical data, what the doctor enters, and from there there's a web interface that's going to tell you, this patient, their condition is going to progress like this, and if you use this medication it'll go like this.
[CARLOS]: I think in two years or so it'll be a little bit ready for people to see.
[CARLOS]: But yeah, it's a project — the goal of the project isn't for this to come out and be put into an NHS hospital, you know?
[SOFÍA]: Just a prototype.
[SOFÍA]: Uh-huh, okay, cool.
[SOFÍA]: It's really nice, because taking something that's developed in research and making a small prototype for something that has an impact on the lives
[SOFÍA]: of doctors, right?
[SOFÍA]: That's really beautiful.
[CARLOS]: And maybe we'll talk about it later, right?
[CARLOS]: Because yeah, going from the prototype to something the average user can really use is a very big gap.
[SOFÍA]: Yes, yes, exactly.
[SOFÍA]: Well, I also wanted to mention that I know first-hand that you organize a monthly seminar on research software development in Spanish, which — well, we've already made several mentions of "the talks," we call them the RSE talks, which mixes English and Spanish a bit, but anyway, yeah, they're talks about software development for research.
[SOFÍA]: And, well, we'll talk a bit more in detail about this a little later, but just to clarify it for our listeners.
[SOFÍA]: If you'd like, we can keep talking a bit more about your career path, about your journey from engineering in Peru to now working as an RSE in London.
[SOFÍA]: What attracted you to this field and what motivated you most to make this international leap?
[CARLOS]: Well, I can tell you what I did.
[CARLOS]: We'll talk more later too.
[CARLOS]: People come to this career in many ways, but I can at least tell you mine.
[CARLOS]: I'm a computer scientist.
[CARLOS]: Well, in Peru we call it systems engineer.
[CARLOS]: I did my five years.
[CARLOS]: I worked in industry, at the insurance company, like I told you.
[CARLOS]: And I always had the little bug of scientific research.
[CARLOS]: I wanted to try it.
[CARLOS]: I did a master's in computer science.
[CARLOS]: And there my advisors told me, hey, if you like this and you want to keep going, why don't you do a PhD?
[SOFÍA]: They dangled a little treat there.
[CARLOS]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[CARLOS]: They convinced me.
[CARLOS]: One Latin American thing is that there's a lot of disparity in the level of scientific development.
[CARLOS]: Peru is not — to put it plainly — we're way behind compared to other countries.
[SOFÍA]: In the region?
[CARLOS]: In the region.
[CARLOS]: Compared to Brazil, which is right next door and is a monster.
[CARLOS]: So I started applying.
[CARLOS]: Luckily they wanted me here in the UK, in London.
[CARLOS]: I did my PhD in Software Engineering here at UCL, where you work, at UCL.
[CARLOS]: And well, I was in the academic world, pure academia, for about 7 years.
[CARLOS]: And in pure academia, well, you write software, but your main responsibility is to write papers.
[CARLOS]: How do you say "paper" in Spanish?
[SOFÍA]: Articles.
[CARLOS]: Scientific articles.
[CARLOS]: Scientific articles.
[CARLOS]: Yeah.
[CARLOS]: But yeah — and I got a bit of... I was doing that for several years, but I got a bit nostalgic, because I've written code professionally for many years, and yeah, I like it.
[CARLOS]: And that's when I saw the opportunity at the Turing, right?
[CARLOS]: And it was my first contact with this world of Research Software Engineering, research software, and I think it's really cool.
[CARLOS]: I get to write my code, but I also keep the connection with [research].
[CARLOS]: At least, I like that a lot.
[CARLOS]: A little bit of both.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, okay.
[SOFÍA]: I'm curious what you missed about coding in industry.
[SOFÍA]: Because from my point of view it's more standardized, more orderly.
[SOFÍA]: What did you miss?
[CARLOS]: I think it's a matter of impact.
[CARLOS]: When you write code in industry, you write it, they validate it, and there are people who are going to use it.
[CARLOS]: In academia you write your code for your paper and only you see it.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, if you're lucky the next PhD student
[SOFÍA]: uses it too.
[CARLOS]: If you're lucky — usually, they throw it away.
[CARLOS]: That feeling of "I make something and there are people who use it" feels nice, at least for me.
[SOFÍA]: Okay, so now we know a bit that you have experience in academia as a researcher.
[SOFÍA]: Well, in fact, you have a PhD in game theory.
[SOFÍA]: And, well, we've said you've also talked about industry, we've talked about the differences between working as a software engineer in industry and in academia.
[SOFÍA]: Well, we know from the talks we had two speakers, Jenny Vega and Lucía Cipolina, who work as research software engineers in industry.
[SOFÍA]: I mean, they do research, but within the private sector.
[SOFÍA]: I mean, Jenny worked at Isomorphic, where they study drug development using artificial intelligence.
[SOFÍA]: Well, pharmaceuticals, sorry.
[SOFÍA]: Developing pharmaceuticals using artificial intelligence.
[SOFÍA]: And Lucía, who worked at Meta.
[SOFÍA]: I don't know if you want to comment anything more on the differences you see between developing software in industry and in academia, even in both cases within research.
[SOFÍA]: Doing research yourself.
[SOFÍA]: What differences do you see?
[CARLOS]: Yes, yes, well.
[CARLOS]: First, to be clear that with this world of corporate research, like what Lucía does at Meta, what Jenny does at Isomorphic, I really don't have much experience there and I think it's a world apart.
[CARLOS]: If you want to know more, go to our page, the slides are there.
[SOFÍA]: Come watch the talks.
[CARLOS]: But I can tell you about the RSE thing in academia, which is what I know.
[CARLOS]: And yeah, I think it's a bit like oil and water.
[CARLOS]: For example, in industry, generally, there's money, right?
[CARLOS]: That translates into having large engineering teams, you have engineers, with project managers, with testers, you have servers, and you have a user community that's more or less large.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah.
[CARLOS]: In academia it's not quite like that.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, of course.
[CARLOS]: Even in the UK, right, which, well, is the first world,
[CARLOS]: there isn't that much money.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, yeah, you can tell the difference, of course.
[CARLOS]: I mean, an RSE project — I don't know how it is for you, Sofía, but if you're lucky, two RSEs, maybe.
[CARLOS]: Yeah.
[CARLOS]: And from there, from there, postdocs.
[CARLOS]: And well, also the money for, at least for compute, is limited, right?
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[CARLOS]: Many use SLURM systems, where people have to wait in line to...
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, does that seem rustic to you?
[SOFÍA]: To me it seems top-notch.
[CARLOS]: I think in industry there's no need to wait in line, it's all just there.
[SOFÍA]: Oh, really?
[SOFÍA]: Of course.
[SOFÍA]: The trade-off that a lot of people mention between working in research in industry and working in research in academia is that in academia you have much more freedom to choose what you want to do, whereas in industry you have to work on something that's productive and that you're told from above is going to make a product.
[SOFÍA]: I mean, it's much narrower.
[SOFÍA]: But, for example, in industry maybe you have much less of other adjacent work like administrative tasks.
[SOFÍA]: I mean, like you say, that if there's one RSE on a project, the RSE is the project manager, the one who applies for the grants, everything.
[SOFÍA]: In industry it seems like you'd only be coding, which is very pleasant for a lot of people.
[SOFÍA]: There are people who get a lot of satisfaction just doing technical things, but you lose freedom over which field you want to develop in.
[SOFÍA]: Do you more or less agree with this view?
[CARLOS]: I think it translates as risk.
[CARLOS]: Precisely because in industry there's so much money, they don't make risky decisions.
[CARLOS]: Instead of building something new, that hasn't been tested, you talk to IBM or Microsoft, you pay for something, they give you a system and that's it.
[CARLOS]: But in academia everything is risk, nothing is certain.
[CARLOS]: Someone wrote a grant saying I'm going to solve world hunger.
[SOFÍA]: Someone trusted them, yeah, someone gave them money.
[CARLOS]: And well, that's the nature of science.
[CARLOS]: You have a plan, you have an ambition, you're going to try many times, you're going to fail many times, and sometimes maybe you'll advance a little bit,
[CARLOS]: And I think that little bit is what's beautiful about our career, right?
[CARLOS]: I mean, it's something new, and nobody's done it, and if it goes well — and it's not that it always goes badly, it goes well many times — you contribute to scientific knowledge, and that's special.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, it's true, that's really beautiful.
[SOFÍA]: Cool, well, thank you very much, Carlos.
[SOFÍA]: If you'd like, let's move on to the next section, in which we wanted to talk a bit about how one becomes an RSE, and talk about the skills and a bit about education,
[SOFÍA]: So, yeah, I wanted to ask you — we've said that whether one comes from academia or from industry, from science or from software, what skills do you think are important for someone who wants to develop a career as an RSE?
[CARLOS]: The important thing is to have a... Well, unfortunately the vast majority of RSEs I know have a PhD.
[CARLOS]: I mean, you're a qualified scientist, you have a little piece of paper that says you're a scientist.
[CARLOS]: Now, I don't think it's necessary, because it's a lot.
[CARLOS]: Five years burning your eyelashes.
[CARLOS]: I don't think that's necessary to be an RSE.
[CARLOS]: But having said that, I think it's important to have a basic knowledge of the scientific world, right?
[CARLOS]: And for this you have to know how, for example, to read a paper, to search the literature.
[CARLOS]: To know how to read a paper you have to know a bit of math, depending on the area you're in, a bit of science, biology, physics, that kind of thing.
[CARLOS]: Well, and these days I think almost all science is data-driven.
[CARLOS]: So you have to know how to process data, right?
[CARLOS]: Your SQL, your pipelines, your pandas if you're a Pythonista.
[SOFÍA]: NumPy, NumPy.
[CARLOS]: NumPy, of course, NumPy.
[CARLOS]: And on the language topic, there are a series of languages that science prefers.
[CARLOS]: People tell me that Fortran is quite popular.
[CARLOS]: I've never touched it to this day, but apparently Fortran is the greatest in the scientific world.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, it also depends on the discipline.
[SOFÍA]: For things that are more numerical methods, I think people use Fortran a lot.
[SOFÍA]: In physics, simulations, it seems like Fortran is used a lot.
[SOFÍA]: But it's true that I'd say in most environments I come across, Python is the most dominant.
[CARLOS]: Or R, right?
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, R too, it's true.
[CARLOS]: For statistics, right?
[CARLOS]: That, because statistics — almost every scientific paper is going to be a claim.
[CARLOS]: How do you say "claim"?
[CARLOS]: A statistical assertion, you have to know how to understand it.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, okay, okay.
[SOFÍA]: So, do you think the PhD path... I mean, do you think a PhD prepares you to be like a scientist, and that you learn skills that are then useful in the RSE field too because you also work in research?
[CARLOS]: Of course, but even so — even here at the Turing we're aware that almost the vast majority of people here have PhDs, but we're trying to make it not be that way.
[CARLOS]: Because it's a very high barrier, I mean, this...
[CARLOS]: Doing a PhD is hard and I don't think it's necessary.
[CARLOS]: I have colleagues here who are very good, very capable, who don't have a PhD.
[CARLOS]: They're a minority.
[CARLOS]: The key is how you go about learning these things without needing to do a PhD.
[CARLOS]: I think it's possible.
[CARLOS]: I think here in the UK there are undergraduate internships.
[CARLOS]: A master's, say, already gives you quite a lot.
[SOFÍA]: I mean, a small exposure to the world of research to basically see what the processes are like, what the methods are like.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, but it's true — for example, I think one of the benefits of RSE is that, and we've seen this in the talks too, that there are backgrounds, like very different careers, that end up in RSE, and I think
[SOFÍA]: that benefits the profession a lot because there are many different points of view from people who have studied different things and have different things to contribute.
[SOFÍA]: I think that benefits the final work a lot.
[SOFÍA]: The more diversity of opinions there is and the more diversity of skills, in general the final product
[SOFÍA]: tends to be better, I'd say.
[SOFÍA]: I understand the Turing being interested in hiring people with a variety of backgrounds rather than everyone being a PhD, because that's, like, too narrow.
[CARLOS]: At the Turing there are hardly many computer scientists, I'm in the minority.
[CARLOS]: From my little survey, I think the vast majority are physicists.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, I see a lot of physicists too, because I get the sense that, whether you're a theoretical or experimental physicist, you end up doing a lot of coding, in both cases, and yeah, you program a ton.
[SOFÍA]: So there are tons of physicists, yeah.
[CARLOS]: Lots of data processing.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah.
[CARLOS]: Oh, God, "procesamiento de datos."
[CARLOS]: That, that, how nice.
[SOFÍA]: I also wanted to mention that we've seen this in the talks, that the profession has very diverse backgrounds, which Riva talked about in her talk too, which is a really good example — Riva Quiroga, who presented at our seminar, and she started out studying literature and language and education, a field that seems pretty far from programming.
[SOFÍA]: And her path is really interesting, I recommend that people at least look at her slides on the website.
[SOFÍA]: And we've also heard about this from many speakers with a background in physics, which we've already mentioned, like Lupe, Jaime, Jesús — I think they all had a background in physics.
[SOFÍA]: Then some with a biology background, like Camilo and Juliana, who both — that's less common, but there are some examples too.
[SOFÍA]: And well, neuroscience, Cecilia came from neuroscience, and from engineering too, some people like Felipe, and Jenny also had an engineering background, I'm an engineer too.
[SOFÍA]: So it's pretty diverse within the sciences, but... I think they come from there — I mean, the sciences are diverse.
[CARLOS]: And there's an effort in the UK for everything to be multidisciplinary, right?
[CARLOS]: People from many backgrounds.
[CARLOS]: And I think that translates into our profession.
[CARLOS]: If science is diverse, research engineers are going to be diverse too.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, exactly.
[SOFÍA]: And well, yeah, we've said sciences, but, well, Riva up there studied literature and education and language, which is more humanities, and even so there's a big push toward digital humanities — I mean, there's software everywhere and everywhere needs research, needs software to be made.
[SOFÍA]: Well, we also wanted to talk a bit about the role of language, which for us — well, we discuss it a lot in the talks too.
[SOFÍA]: We know that many learning resources for programming and software development are in English.
[SOFÍA]: So I wanted to ask you whether you think this is a barrier for more engineers from Latin America to make the leap into the RSE world.
[CARLOS]: I'm not sure about that, but when I was studying, decades ago now at university,
[SOFÍA]: But you're young, Carlos.
[CARLOS]: No, look at the gray hairs, look at the gray hairs.
[SOFÍA]: You can't see them.
[CARLOS]: People from when I was studying — the people who knew English fluently enough to read a book or listen to a talk were the minority.
[CARLOS]: I mean, knowing English was a privilege.
[CARLOS]: Now, I think these days — well, I'm talking about the Peruvian context, which is the one I know best.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah.
[CARLOS]: It's a little bit less, but even so it's still quite a lot.
[CARLOS]: And that's a good thing — sometimes I disagree with Diego, but I think language shouldn't be an obstacle to being a capable computer scientist.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, I agree with that, and I think Diego really does too.
[SOFÍA]: To me it seems like a loss for all sides — I mean, English speakers shouldn't confine themselves only to other English speakers, right?
[SOFÍA]: There are a lot of interesting things, and we see it a lot in the talks, that when people come to present we see people who approach the RSE profession with a lot of creativity in very different contexts, and that's really interesting to see.
[SOFÍA]: For example, we saw these initiatives from ixpantia with Mauro,
[SOFÍA]: and from Tabular with Riva, which are like a kind of freelance, freelance RSE.
[SOFÍA]: And in the UK that would be much harder for it to emerge, because the RSE profession exists within the academic sphere.
[SOFÍA]: I think we'd miss out on that kind of novelty, innovations, if we don't connect with other groups who speak another language and are in other contexts, right?
[CARLOS]: Yeah, yeah.
[SOFÍA]: So yeah, it's enriching, I think.
[SOFÍA]: And besides, in general, RSE groups tend to have people who speak several languages.
[CARLOS]: That's the thing, right?
[CARLOS]: I mean, I think Diego's point was that everything would be ideal if everyone spoke English.
[CARLOS]: Because it's the lingua franca of the world and it's the lingua franca of science and of computing.
[CARLOS]: But, at least in my part, my little corner of the world, it's going to take a while before we get to, I don't know, like Germany, right?
[CARLOS]: Or I think the Netherlands, where the vast majority speak English fluently.
[CARLOS]: And I think we definitely have to work on that, we have to give people English.
[CARLOS]: But while that happens — and I suspect that in countries like Peru it'll be decades.
[CARLOS]: People have a language, which is a really beautiful language.
[SOFÍA]: We like it, we like it.
[CARLOS]: Speaking Spanish shouldn't be an impediment, I think, to being a capable engineer.
[SOFÍA]: Lately, I think — similar, well, we've talked about this several times too — it would be great if learning English fluently weren't a requirement for programming.
[SOFÍA]: I mean, it would be great if there were different entry points to the same sector.
[SOFÍA]: I mean, maybe you don't speak English
[SOFÍA]: very fluently but you do know how to program, and from there you get into the open source community, you start speaking more English, you start improving and programming more too, and in the end you end up in this profession.
[SOFÍA]: Without first requiring you to learn perfect English and then get into the world of programming — I mean, it seems to me
[SOFÍA]: It gives me hope that there are several entry points.
[SOFÍA]: Not just a kind of funnel where everyone passes through English.
[CARLOS]: I don't know.
[CARLOS]: This is a purely irrational thing.
[CARLOS]: I don't have any specification, but it makes me really sad that I can't talk about my profession in Spanish.
[CARLOS]: And what we see in the RSE talks every single time is that it's hard to talk about computing in Spanish.
[CARLOS]: It's hard.
[CARLOS]: I don't know how to say "pipeline."
[CARLOS]: I don't know how to say "trade-off."
[SOFÍA]: Well, that doesn't bother me much, it's like — it amuses me that some words do come from English, and there's a number, like the "rack" thing — do you remember when it was the cluster thing?
[SOFÍA]: There someone was presenting a... Yeah, it was like... "cupboard"?
[SOFÍA]: It really amuses me.
[SOFÍA]: But yeah, I get it, I get it.
[SOFÍA]: I mean, yeah, I understand what you mean.
[CARLOS]: Yeah, well, a little word here and there, right?
[CARLOS]: This, I don't know, you've got phrases like "laissez faire," that kind of thing, right?
[SOFÍA]: Yeah.
[CARLOS]: The vast majority of speakers, when we told them, hey, talk about your career in Spanish, it's not easy for anyone.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah.
[CARLOS]: It's not easy for me either.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, it's hard.
[SOFÍA]: I feel like I speak a strange Spanish.
[SOFÍA]: When I'm like... Because suddenly you're translating from English to Spanish.
[SOFÍA]: But anyway, what do I know — really, if you end up working in this profession, the two languages are probably going to coexist in your work environment, one way or another, and yeah, I don't know.
[CARLOS]: Maybe we should embrace — how do you say it in Spanish?
[CARLOS]: Adopt Spanglish, right?
[SOFÍA]: I like Spanglish.
[CARLOS]: The language of computing in Latin America.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, like in Miami where they speak a ton of Spanglish too, I love hearing it.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah.
[SOFÍA]: If you could talk with a student who's brilliant at programming, but maybe is a bit afraid that their level of English isn't enough to work as an RSE, what would you recommend to them?
[CARLOS]: There I do think there's an insecurity thing.
[CARLOS]: I don't know if it's a Latin American or Ibero-American thing, but a lot of people I know, in Peru at least, want to speak perfectly before throwing themselves out there and talking with, for example, a native English speaker.
[CARLOS]: And there's all this stress of, don't I have to have perfect pronunciation?
[CARLOS]: But when you go to a city like London, which is pretty diverse, you'll see, there are tons of accents, some more legible than others.
[CARLOS]: Even within the English-speaking world, a Scot or a Welshman or an Irishman,
[CARLOS]: they speak differently, right?
[CARLOS]: And I think that's a benefit of English being the lingua franca of the world — that since everyone speaks it, there's a certain tolerance for whatever level of fluency you have, right?
[CARLOS]: Yeah.
[CARLOS]: Now, there's a minimum threshold, yes.
[CARLOS]: But as long as you get past that, people are going to understand you.
[CARLOS]: And I think you'll know whether they understand you or not by jumping into the pool.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[SOFÍA]: And I think London is indeed a case where you see a lot of diversity of accents.
[SOFÍA]: So I, as a person with a Spanish accent, as a Spanish-speaking person, well, I feel very welcomed because everyone has an accent.
[SOFÍA]: I mean, the voice that calls out to you on the platform to get you onto the Tube has an accent.
[SOFÍA]: So, well, you feel very welcomed.
[SOFÍA]: And I do also notice, for example, in academia, at scientific conferences and so on,
[SOFÍA]: there's also a lot of diversity of accents, and I feel that when I hear someone ask a question at a conference with an accent, I feel more comfortable asking a question too.
[SOFÍA]: I think we don't talk enough about the diversity of accents — to me it also seems enriching and I find it really beautiful to see how people pronounce different words, I mean, the same word in English in different ways depending on the set of phonemes they have in mind, I don't know how to explain it, I find that beautiful and I think we don't talk enough about how enriching the diversity of accents is too.
[SOFÍA]: It's true, and I think you're absolutely right, you shouldn't be embarrassed — I think there are a lot of people who get held back because accents are also associated with class things and it's hard, and I think you have to be a bit more relaxed and accept accents as something beautiful.
[SOFÍA]: It reminded me of something I think Riva told me, that, for example, she told me that in Latin America there are sometimes conferences in Spanish and Portuguese where people speak a kind of "portuñol."
[SOFÍA]: I also have a Spanish friend who went to Brazil and gave a presentation in portuñol, I don't know if it was an hour long.
[SOFÍA]: And people aren't embarrassed.
[SOFÍA]: I mean, you know what I mean?
[SOFÍA]: It's as if it were a familiar environment in which you're not embarrassed to speak with an accent or not to speak Portuguese, because in the end, you know?
[SOFÍA]: So it's like, why can't we transfer that a bit to English?
[SOFÍA]: I mean, not that you start speaking in Spanish, because I think it'd be harder for someone to understand you, but not being embarrassed about having accents, and in the end people understand each other.
[CARLOS]: Yeah, that's...
[CARLOS]: I don't know what it is.
[CARLOS]: I think it's because, well, in South America the countries are big and people don't travel much, right?
[CARLOS]: It seems to me...
[CARLOS]: Something that happened to me when I came here, and I don't know if it happened to you, is that at first it bothered me when people didn't understand my accent.
[CARLOS]: And well, you'll know there aren't many Peruvians here in London, we're a minority.
[SOFÍA]: Well, but suddenly you're all... There are tons of Peruvians at the talks.
[CARLOS]: That's true, at the talks, yes.
[CARLOS]: But yeah, I mean, I had to, I don't know, accept that when people hear my English, it's going to be the first time they hear an accent like mine, that at first they won't understand me, it's fine, I speak a little more slowly, and you realize as time goes on, people learn.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, yeah.
[SOFÍA]: And to get over the idea that it's not your problem.
[SOFÍA]: Really, if someone doesn't understand your accent, the problem belongs to both the sender and the receiver.
[SOFÍA]: I mean, the receiver isn't used to how you're pronouncing things either.
[SOFÍA]: I mean, I think many times we put all the responsibility on ourselves, like, oh, nobody understands my accent.
[SOFÍA]: I don't know, someone who maybe has never left a village in Scotland, it's normal that they haven't heard your accent and don't understand you, but the responsibility isn't all yours.
[SOFÍA]: Quite the achievement that you've learned another language.
[CARLOS]: Exactly, we're bilingual.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, I think it's nice to talk about this too.
[CARLOS]: Yeah, but in cities like London, and I imagine maybe in New York, people have accents and it's pretty accepted.
[CARLOS]: In science I think it's pretty accepted in general.
[SOFÍA]: To close out the language topic, I think code is closer to symbolic language than to natural language than it might seem at first glance.
[SOFÍA]: And these keywords are like symbolic language, really.
[SOFÍA]: So my impression is that linguistic barriers affect access to professional communities more, for example, the RSE community.
[SOFÍA]: Do you think this is true?
[SOFÍA]: What do you think about it?
[CARLOS]: I think programming language is more symbolic, but it's not that far from natural language either,
[CARLOS]: it seems to me, I mean, function names, you try to make them verbs, variable names, that they be nouns, but yeah, I mean, it shouldn't be a barrier to getting together with your colleagues, right?
[CARLOS]: At least at a local level.
[CARLOS]: In my Java days, there were very active local groups, right?
[CARLOS]: Java users of Lima, of Peru.
[SOFÍA]: How nice, yeah.
[CARLOS]: To make the international leap, yeah, the entry point is [English].
[CARLOS]: But there's also the other side, right?
[CARLOS]: I mean, it could be a Latin American community and there we could speak [Spanish] — English.
[CARLOS]: I think we shouldn't fail to take advantage, at least with Spanish, of the fact that so many of us speak it all over the world.
[CARLOS]: I think if it's a Latin American computing conference, submitting papers in Spanish should be [the norm].
[CARLOS]: Like the Brazilians, right?
[CARLOS]: They have tons of conferences in Portuguese and they submit their papers in Portuguese.
[SOFÍA]: Right, yeah, but it's that there are tons of them.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true.
[SOFÍA]: Well, and now that you mention this, we know there's a professional RSE group in Chile, RSE Chile, that Riva Quiroga is involved in, and also recently RSE Argentina has come out.
[SOFÍA]: So, well, professional communities are emerging whose working language is Spanish in these regions, which I think is really good so that people can start to connect.
[SOFÍA]: Do you also remember joining these Java groups and that
[SOFÍA]: it changes your perspective a bit?
[SOFÍA]: Because I feel like when you start being a group, it's like the work is much more welcoming.
[SOFÍA]: Did you feel something like that?
[CARLOS]: Yeah, of course.
[CARLOS]: It's very human.
[CARLOS]: You look for your tribe.
[SOFÍA ]: Yeah.
[CARLOS]: And I think programmers are pretty tribal, right?
[CARLOS]: The Emacs ones.
[CARLOS]: Yeah.
[CARLOS]: Vim.
[SOFÍA]: Oh, yeah.
[SOFÍA]: It's true.
[SOFÍA]: Oh, my God.
[SOFÍA]: Vim, I only know how to quit.
[CARLOS]: I don't even know that.
[SOFÍA]: Well, the next block of questions is about the role of RSE in Latin America.
[SOFÍA]: Well, in previous episodes of this podcast there's been talk about how the RSE role is emerging in countries in Asia or Africa.
[SOFÍA]: And in the talks too we've heard super interesting perspectives on how this profession is emerging in South America, as we mentioned earlier — Mauro Lepore told us about ixpantia, or Riva Quiroga about Tabular and also about the work at RSE Chile.
[SOFÍA]: Which are, like, innovative proposals that are really interesting to hear about, because here in the UK maybe not — in the UK context, we don't hear about this kind of alternative.
[SOFÍA]: Also in one of the first sessions we heard from Pablo, who represents the case of the unofficial RSE in the UK.
[SOFÍA]: This is just to summarize a bit the different types of RSE we've seen and also in different geographies.
[SOFÍA]: How do you see the outlook for research software engineers in Peru, in Latin America today?
[SOFÍA]: Do you think there are a lot of unofficial RSEs, for example?
[CARLOS]: I suspect the vast majority are unofficial, right?
[CARLOS]: But I think it goes more along the lines that science in Latin America is a little bit behind science in the first world, basically that's it.
[CARLOS]: But we have tons of powerhouses — Chile, Argentina, Chile, Mexico itself, right?
[CARLOS]: but in other places, yeah, science is a little bit behind.
[CARLOS]: And I think that's the consequence, because in the end we're engineers who work in science.
[CARLOS]: If science isn't so developed, well, there's no space.
[SOFÍA]: But well, the advantage is also that there are tons of engineers, I get that sense, and very well trained, I don't know how to put it, with very good skills.
[SOFÍA]: Do you get that impression, or not?
[CARLOS]: Yeah, I mean, I think there's quite a lot of potential.
[CARLOS]: There's a ton of potential.
[CARLOS]: But, I mean, if you're a PI, a principal investigator, who's been given a little bit of money for your grant — how do you say "grant" in Spanish?
[CARLOS]: For your project, your project.
[CARLOS]: You'd rather hire a postdoctoral researcher than a computer scientist, right?
[CARLOS]: Even here in the UK, I think it's not the vast majority of projects that hire people like you and me, right?
[CARLOS]: Yeah, yeah, it's true.
[CARLOS]: Yeah, I think that's the limiting factor.
[CARLOS]: But I think it's improving, right?
[CARLOS]: I mean, initiatives like Riva's, I think in Brazil they already have their RSE chapter too.
[CARLOS]: Things are changing, right?
[CARLOS]: I think there's a recognition of science in general.
[CARLOS]: I mean, software supports science, like you said at the beginning.
[CARLOS]: Good software, good science.
[CARLOS]: If we don't professionalize software development in the scientific world, there's a big risk that the science won't be good.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, or that it won't advance fast enough, or yeah, yeah, that it won't be high quality.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, how nice.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, well, also about initiatives that are emerging in the Latin America region, Riva is also participating in organizing a conference that I think is going to be entirely in Spanish, hybrid, that's going to be announced now
[SOFÍA]: Well, maybe by the time this podcast comes out it'll have been announced, and we'll include details in the description.
[SOFÍA]: But yeah, it's called RSE Latam, and it's going to be hybrid, and in August, and, well, in Spanish, and to give the opportunity to people who work in this profession, even if not officially as an RSE, to connect and build a bit of community, which I think could be really great.
[CARLOS]: Yeah, definitely.
[CARLOS]: I mean, there are people doing computing and science.
[CARLOS]: There are.
[CARLOS]: All over Latin America there are.
[CARLOS]: They probably don't have the title of RSE or Research Software Engineer, but they're doing it.
[CARLOS]: And how cool, this initiative.
[CARLOS]: Getting together is always good.
[CARLOS]: It's nice.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah.
[SOFÍA]: The last block of questions is about our seminar, the RSE talks in Spanish.
[SOFÍA]: So I wanted to ask you about how this idea came about and why you decided to do it.
[CARLOS]: Ah, well, you know it better than I do, but I can tell the story.
[CARLOS]: Yeah, well, I think in Europe the UK is a little bit ahead on RSE matters, Research Software Engineers.
[CARLOS]: Well, Sofía and I went to the UK RSE conference, it was in 2024 I think, right?
[SOFÍA]: Yeah.
[CARLOS]: Yeah, and well, it's a really nice community, it seems to me, that cares about the important issues.
[CARLOS]: And one of the issues we have in, I think, in computing and science, is the issue of diversity.
[CARLOS]: I mean, unfortunately, in science and in computing, there's no diversity.
[CARLOS]: And it's something that should be improved.
[CARLOS]: At RSECon, this conference, there was a panel, talk, seminar about diversity.
[CARLOS]: And well, the topic came up that I think the people who speak Spanish, at least in the UK, are a minority.
[CARLOS]: Maybe not really.
[CARLOS]: And I simply said, there's a diversity issue, there's a lack of Spanish speakers.
[CARLOS]: That's all I did, and from there you, Sofía, contacted me, and well, the initiative came about.
[CARLOS]: How many editions are we up to now, Sofía?
[SOFÍA]: Let's see, let me check.
[SOFÍA]: On our page.
[SOFÍA]: Well, at least we've been going for a year and a bit, right?
[SOFÍA]: We started in, I think in November...
[SOFÍA]: We've been going a year and... We started in November 2024 or something like that.
[SOFÍA]: So we're not doing badly.
[SOFÍA]: And we've had few misses, every month.
[CARLOS]: Yeah, yeah.
[CARLOS]: Almost none.
[CARLOS]: And something I should say is that, I mean, organizing a talk is...
[CARLOS]: It's not that hard, but it's not that easy either.
[CARLOS]: But there's one problem we don't have, which is that there are tons of speakers we can contact.
[CARLOS]: There are tons of people from Latin America or from Spain who are doing computer science at the highest level.
[CARLOS]: Fortunately they have the courtesy to come to our humble seminar.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, for us it's a luxury.
[SOFÍA]: I think we get to hear some really excellent presentations.
[SOFÍA]: Some super interesting topics, in a different context, from super well-prepared people, and it doesn't — I love it.
[CARLOS]: We make it hard for them because our only requirement is that they speak Spanish.
[CARLOS]: More than 90% of the presentation, but...
[SOFÍA]: We should be stricter, like you say.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, if they say "multithreading"...
[CARLOS]: Punishment, punishment.
[SOFÍA]: A tomato or something.
[CARLOS]: Yeah, but it really is very cool.
[CARLOS]: And well, the seminar is virtual, open, and everyone who wants to join is more than welcome.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, and lastly, I also wanted to comment — well, in another episode of the podcast, Jyoti Bhogal mentioned how in many parts of the world the term RSE isn't an official position and people work under other titles, we've already mentioned this, right?
[SOFÍA]: Like developer or programmer, without knowing that they're part of this global community.
[SOFÍA]: Jesús Elizari also mentioned in his talk that when he started his position, he didn't even know he was an RSE.
[SOFÍA]: I mean, he met Diego and he told him, ah, so I'm an RSE, okay.
[SOFÍA]: That this happened a lot.
[SOFÍA]: So, I was thinking, what activities or what practices do you think can help better connect the Spanish-speaking community with this discipline?
[SOFÍA]: I mean, like, I suppose we hope the talks serve that purpose.
[SOFÍA]: Do you think there's anything else?
[CARLOS]: I think that's it, right?
[CARLOS]: Basically building community, awareness, however you say it in Spanish.
[SOFÍA]: Being aware.
[CARLOS]: For example, I remember that, well, in Peru it was the systems engineer, right?
[CARLOS]: Or the computer scientist.
[CARLOS]: Yeah.
[CARLOS]: And suddenly the new thing came along that people who do computing should be software engineers.
[CARLOS]: And little by little, little by little, people started to identify.
[CARLOS]: No, I'm a software engineer, software engineer.
[CARLOS]: Now there are even undergraduate degrees that are software engineering, or master's degrees in software engineering.
[CARLOS]: It was something, I think, organic, maybe influenced by the neighbors to the north, the United States.
[CARLOS]: Something like that would ideally happen, that people in science start to hire, to work more with research software engineers, and little by
[CARLOS]: little people are going to realize it's an alternative.
[CARLOS]: If you're a computer scientist you can work in many places, one of those places is doing science.
[SOFÍA]: Yeah, excellent.
[SOFÍA]: Well, thank you very much for this little while, Carlos, and thank you very much to Peter for giving us this space, thank you very much to our listeners for listening to us, and we hope this conversation has been useful for getting to know this profession better and maybe, for some, for practicing a little Spanish too.
[SOFÍA]: We'd like to remind you that if you're interested in learning more about this world, you're all invited to the RSE talks, our monthly seminar in Spanish about software engineering for research.
[SOFÍA]: It takes place in person in London and also online one Monday each month at 4 in the afternoon, UK time.
[SOFÍA]: And you can find more details about the upcoming sessions at charlas-rse-espanol.github.io.
[SOFÍA]: And by the way, this podcast is covered by the Creative Commons license.
[CARLOS]: See you soon!
[CARLOS]: Thanks, Peter.
[CARLOS]: Thanks, Sofía.
[CARLOS]: And we'll see you at the next RSE talk.
[CARLOS]: Bye, bye!
[SOFÍA]: Goodbye!