As it’s approaching the end of the term, it seems like a good time to look back on our most popular blog posts of 2020. Unsurprisingly several of the top ten posts are related to working from home and the challenges that it brought!

Microsoft have recently launched a new community for Research Software Engineers (RSEs), Data Scientists, Data Stewards and System Administrators.

For those with long term, constant and often debilitating pain, taking part in a study requiring multiple questionnaires on levels of pain to be completed would be difficult, if not impossible. Research Software Engineers have developed an app for mobile devices to make this a much easier prospect.

Learn more about using Github repositories for starting new projects from two of our Research Software Engineers Douglas Lowe and Robin Long.

Find out more about our new Edge Compute Service - an alternative computational resource.

Find out more about Computational Shared Facility 4 (CFS4), also known as ALAN (Advanced Linux Algorithms and Numerics) - a brand new platform at the University

Are you a researcher that needs to access a large dataset? Are you working off-campus and are struggling to run analysis on data that is stored on-campus? Find out how Research IT can help.

Find out how Peter Crowther, a Research Software Engineer in Research IT, helped Christopher Daniel from the Lightform Group in the Department of Materials to improve and prepare his code ready for publication.

Git is becoming a common tool, widely used for organising code, recording developments, etc. Often, we want to reuse code from one project for another, or to have a standard layout or template that can be used for similar projects. Here Robin Long and Douglas Lowe, from the RSE team, will detail the features available in git and github for making your life easier with this.

The University has purchased a license to allow the download and install of the full suite of MATLAB products on to both staff and students’ own, or University provided, computers.

The Rest-Activity Pattern app (RAPapp) developed by Research IT’s Mobile Development Service (MDS) allows users to send sleep and activity data measured by their smart watches or fitness trackers to University researchers, while sharing their personalised “activity plots” to their social media. This is all part of a priority project looking at how the lockdown has affected rest-activity patterns in EEA countries.

The popular CIUK (Computing Insight UK) event is moving online this year.