RSSE Africa March Newsletter

Research Software Alliance appoints Community Engagement Partner for Africa

The Research Software Alliance (ReSA) is a non-profit organisation on a mission to bring research software communities together to collaborate on advancing the research software ecosystem. In February 2023, ReSA appointed Talarify as the African ReSA Community Engagement Partner. This is exciting news for RSSE Africa, as this new collaboration could lead to more visibility and awareness of the community activities, challenges, and achievements.

Read more...

Community News

Data Science and Machine Learning at PyCon Namibia 2023

In February, the eighth edition of PyCon Namibia took place in Windhoek. The 3-day event featured local and international speakers. For the full programme, visit their website.

Read more about the event in their report and follow PyCon Namibia on Twitter: @PyConNA.

(Image credit: PyCon Namibia)

Important dates

African Carpentries Community Meetups
23 March 2023
12 - 13pm SAST/10 - 11am UTC

We meet every 4th Thursday of the month to discuss topics related to workshops, resources, opportunities, and events. Read more about The Carpentries in Africa.

Click here to sign up!

Community member spotlight

Every month, we will spotlight one African community member in this newsletter. This is an opportunity to showcase important work and build your online presence.

Each showcase will be shared as an interview — we will share a list of questions about your career, day-to-day work, aspirations, and more.

Nominate yourself or someone to be featured

February Spotlight: Mohammed Ali

Data Analyst at Interstellar for Consulting

“Always participate in community projects, contribute to open source projects and help others that will help you and be a great investment in your career.”

Nominations for presentations

This year's meetups will intensely focus on showcasing African research software developers and their work to encourage networking and discussion.

We'd like to invite you to do a short informal presentation about your work. Tell us about your projects, the infrastructure you use, the languages you code in, or the challenges and successes you've experienced.

Sign-up to present here

Interesting open access publications

Infrastructure for bioinformatics applications in Tanzania: Lessons from the Sickle Cell Programme

Mwita LA, Mawalla WF, Mtiiye FR, Kandonga D, Kent J, Makani J, et al. (2023)
PLoS Comput Biol 19(2): e1010848.

Read the article online

Ten simple rules for funding scientific open source software

Strasser C, Hertweck K, Greenberg J, Taraborelli D, Vu E (2022)
PLoS Comput Biol 18(11): e1010627.

Read the article online

Exciting open educational resources

Training Materials for Research Software Engineering at INTERSECT - read more...
How to fetch API data in R and Python - read more...

"Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite and reuse."

— Eric S. Raymond