Long-time listener, first-time caller: My RSE Identity Journey

Research Software Engineering (RSE) covers a wide spectrum of people who fall somewhere in between domain research science and software engineering.  While this makes the community highly inclusive, it can be difficult for some to know if they qualify as an RSE or not and hesitate to engage.  In this talk I will share my personal journey from research in software engineering (SER) to RSE.

As someone who was never formally a software engineer in the classic sense but a researcher using software engineering methods in domain science, I never felt like I had any particular identity.  Upon first hearing the term “RSE”, I immediately identified.  However, over the next two years of slowly engaging with the community - including attending US-RSE’23 - I was still hesitant to see myself as one as my journey and position looked different than most of who I was seeing.  It wasn’t until attendance in a recent Dagstuhl seminar that brought together SERs and RSEs that I was able to debate my insecurities first-hand and settle into my identity.

Throughout my experiences I have met a wide array of different types of RSEs.  Each coming from their own backgrounds, skill sets, job titles, daily practices, team composition, career priorities, and challenges.  Many of these types which I have yet to see well-represented or understood in the community.  In my talk I will not only share my personal experiences, but also highlight several examples of diverse types of people who identify as RSEs in order to provide a broader representation to the community and encourage anyone on the edges as I once needed that they do belong.