It's a process

Frank Loeffler is one of the founding members of the German RSE association. In this episode he takes us through the process to build a community more or less from scratch.

In this recording Frank takes us through the various stages - and challenges - that he and his RSE friends took to build the German RSE association.
Like so many other RSEs, Frank Loeffler’s career began in science; physics to be precise. As such he worked in different research areas in and out of Germany. During a research assignment in the US (Louisiana State University), Frank attended the first RSE conference in Manchester, UK in 2016. This was a crucial moment. Frank met other like-minded colleagues from Germany all motivated to build a community there as well. In a period when the term “RSE” did not exist, becoming a research software engineer was a process, as Frank describes. Of course, much of this has changed in the meantime. In fact, Frank himself will be leading a team of RSEs at his university in the near future.