STFC Scientific Computing’s Post

Four of our fantastic graduates recently had the incredible opportunity to visit CERN for the Inverted CERN School of Computing. Harriet Jones, one of these lucky graduates, shares her thoughts on the experience: “The school consists of a combination of lectures and hands-on exercises, given by former CERN School of Computing students. It was attended in person by over 35 students and Early Career Researchers from across Europe, while many more joined the lectures remotely. George C. and Elizabeth Mamchits, who both recently completed the STFC Scientific Computing Graduate Programme and are now Research Software Engineers in CCP-EM and DAFNI: Data & Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure respectively, both attended as lecturers. George’s talk was titled “Web for the win! A crash course in building web apps” and covered the fundamentals needed for platform-agnostic interfaces. Elizabeth spoke on “Automate All the Things: CI/CD for the Bold and the Brave”, providing a practical, in-depth look at modern CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment) best practices within GitLab and GitHub environments. Both also presented highly engaging exercises, which were very well received. Bhumika Mistry (AI for Science) and myself attended as students of the school, and we agreed that we were quite overwhelmed with the sheer quality and quantity of the learning material available! As well as the wonderful academic experience, we were also treated to a tour of the Antimatter Factory and the CERN Data Centre, and a networking dinner in the CERN restaurant with a beautiful view of the mountains – neither Rutherford Appleton Laboratory nor Daresbury Laboratory can quite compete with that view! Many thanks to the amazing organisational team and students/lecturers for making this school a very special experience.”