If someone had told me only four years ago, that I would try to make a living with podcasting, I would have laughed straight into their faces. But then, life rarely follows a straight line or pattern.

It all started with a degree in particle physics from the Universität of Hamburg, Germany. Physics is what I wanted to do in my life and after finishing my thesis, I started as a Research Fellow for a British Heart Foundation research project in medical physics and imaging in London. A role I sincerely hoped would lead to a permanent job.

Alas, most of research funding (still) is temporary and after a couple of extensions it was necessary to look elsewhere.

At this point, I already spent a considerable amount of time on computer programming (at the time Fortran, C++ and Java), and some on system administration (VMS on VAX from Digital Equipment, Sun OS, FreeBSD, Linux…). The term research engineering did not exist, yet. It was just something a PhD student or post-Doc would do in the course of their work. Most of it was self-taught and only some of us had prior hands-on experiences with computers. I did not.

However, by the time the research project did end in the year 2000, I got enough work practice and knowledge to seek a role in the private sector. Not as a physicist. But as a software engineer.

I got lucky. My first role, as senior software engineer no less, was with Sony Broadcasting and Professional at their UK offices in Basingstoke. To say I learnt a lot would be an utter understatement. There, I experienced - and was able to experiment with - different software development methodologies (e.g. eXtreme Programming), languages and learnt what it takes to work as an effective development team.

It was also an important lesson from a different perspective: it taught me, that changing your career path is not only possible, but also doable. This is despite all the obstacles, risks and the fact that you get little encouragement.

With that in mind, my career took another turn in 2012, when I decided to move into mobile app development. Two years before, I started to play with developing iOS and Android apps. And in 2011 I launched an app, iStayHealthy, to support people living with HIV in managing their chronic condition. The app did reasonably well on the AppStore (it is discontinued). As an enthusiastic mobile device developer and user, I had the necessary boost to go for a role as iOS developer at Alfresco. And, after cutting my teeth there, I moved on to Elsevier to help them with the Mendeley iOS app and build a mobile development team. Elsevier is well known as a science publisher. Maybe less so as a tech company. But interesting work gets done there and I had the privilege to meet and work with a number of fascinating and inspiring people.

But then something happened in 2018: a colleague of mine recommended joining a Slack channel (we were all using Slack in the office) called RSE. RSE stands for Research Software Engineering. And it was the first time I heard about it. There was even a charity for that (whose Slack channel it still is). I joined and found a number of interesting discussions. I believe I even joined an open HPC (high performance computing) community call once, just to get a flavour of what’s happening.

Out of curiosity I looked up the ‘jobs’ channel in summer 2019. Imperial College and University College London were looking to fill permanent roles for Research Software Engineers (RSE). Both intrigued me and I decided to apply for the role at UCL. At this stage I was well out of academia for nearly 20 years and reckoned my chances would be negligable. But to my surprise I got the interview, then the role. And so, on 2 December 2019, I started my new career. Back in academia. Back in research. And then…

…Covid-19 struck. And everything changed. Everybody was in lockdown. We were all working from home. And keeping teams together and keeping communication lines up and running became vital. Even more so for a community, such as research software engineers, which is still relatively new.

In June 2020 I joined forces with Vanessa Sochat, who was then at Stanford University in the US. Vanessa has been running a podcast called RSE Stories (now called Developer Stories). Luckily, she took a chance on me and let me produce and co-host a bunch of episodes on the show in summer and autumn 2020.

Engineering and podcasting are really different beasts. And producing podcast episodes was (and is) definitely pushing me out of my comfort zone. But I also love doing it!

Mad perhaps, but in 2021, I decided to launch Code for Thought as a podcast for researchers, scientists, software engineers and anyone interested in this space. Running both a podcast and doing a full-time RSE job at UCL was getting difficult and so in 2022 I reduced my UCL working hours to free up time for podcasting. Which worked initially.

But at the beginning of 2023 I faced a choice: listener numbers were going up and podcast production took up more and more time. I saw an opportunity to strengthen the podcasting effort. But not while I keep working as an RSE at the same time. Something had to give. And it was my job at UCL that did.

And so, in June 2023, I ended my role as research software engineer at UCL and started a new chapter in my career: as a podcast host and producer for podcasts in Research, Science and Software Engineering.