National Research Software Day 2025

National Research Software Day 2025 was a big success, thanks to the professional organisation of the TU Delft and NL-RSE, and of course the funding by TU Delft, LCRDM and Open Science NL.

Seven parallel sessions were hosted by the eScience Center:

  1. SMP Tool: Create a Software Management Plan That Fits Your Project — Ole Mussmann
  2. Natural Language Processing Fundamentals — Angel Daza
  3. Research Software Training Netherlands (RST-NL) Network — Fenne Riemslagh
  4. Efficient computing in Julia – a new lesson — Johan Hidding
  5. RESOlution: Measuring and Benchmarking the Impact of Research Software & Is Your Research Software Ready for Open Science? — Deekshita
  6. eScience Center refreshed strategy — Carlos Martinez Ortiz
  7. Showing Research Software Impact with the Research Software Directory — Jason Maassen

Session highlights

All eScience Center sessions received positive feedback. To give an impression of what we presented, we highlight two of the sessions:

  • Our colleague Johan Hidding hosted an unconference session on the dissemination of Literate Programming using Entangled. The idea is to hold an NL-RSE meetup where people can bring their messy notebook and transform it into a nicely presented reusable self-explaining literate gem. So keep your eyes on the NL-RSE agenda for future developments!
  • How can a Software Management Plan (SMP) help you conduct better research? And how do you create one with minimal effort? Ole Mussmann and Sander van Rijn presented a guided questionnaire to help you find out which best-practices you should think about for your software project.
A big thank you to the organisation and the keynote speakers.
Lijm & Cultuur in Delft: an inspirational venue.
Fenne Riemslag won a TDCC-NES funding of 2000 euros for starting-up a soft skill training in 2026.

Reactions from our colleagues

Community Manager Carlos Martinez-Ortiz: “It was an honour to pitch the “eScience Center refreshed strategy” at the NRSD. We got some very useful feedback and interesting discussions afterwards. We look forward to further develop our strategy to meet the needs of the research software community”.

RSE Jaro Camphuijsen: “From the whole NRSD I enjoyed two things the most of all. The first was meeting so many people, among which many ex-colleagues, that I knew. It really felt like a community I belong to.
Secondly, I joined the ad-hoc organised unconference session on “AI-assistance in Research Software Engineering” and it was super interesting. There were some fanatics that were extremely fond of the tools they use, also some sceptics that did not want to use the tool and some people in between. This composition of the group resulted in interesting discussions. The group discussed many of the practical, technical and especially ethical considerations regarding the use of AI for coding assistance and the use of Generative AI in general. The main consensus that ran through the whole session was that anything that was created by an AI, whether it is code or text, should always be reviewed and understood by the person that generated it.
I think it is very important that we, as research supporters, have an opinion and know how to deal with researchers that use AI-assistance. It is important even (or maybe especially) if we are sceptic ourselves, because it is becoming more prevalent by the day, whether we like it or not.”

RSE Stijn Heldens: “One of the things that stuck with me was the way Dr. Connie Clare (Community Development Manager at the Research Data Alliance) defined the term ‘community’:” “People with a shared purpose come together to achieve goals and tasks they would not be able to do on their own.”