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Joe Wallwork, Institute of Computing for Climate Science, University of Cambridge, jw2423@cam.ac.uk

I am now halfway through my CAKE fellowship focused on improving knowledge exchange (KE) for Fortran through the Fortran index hackathon series. There are a few things to report on achievements so far and future plans.

One of the most visible things to note is that we now have a Fortran index website! It is hosted at https://fortran-index.github.io and includes information related to the series and how the hackathons work, as well as a listing of past and upcoming events. When you visit this page, the first thing you will notice is that we also have a Fortran index logo! This is inspired by the Fortran-lang logo used in my previous blogpost, but with a subscript i, following the standard notation for an index of an array.

Since the previous blog post was published, we held an online Fortran index hackathon in March, in which we continued work on improving Fortran-lang’s package index. In April, my CAKE fellowship funded travel to Belfast for the Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaborations Workshop and the ‘Back to the Fortran Future 3’ satellite event (see https://fortran-lang.org/news/2026/05-05-Back-to-the-Fortran-Future-3 for a write-up). During the ‘hackday’ part of the Collaborations Workshop, I joined a team working on improving Fortran training materials along with Dimitri Theodorakis (Met Office), Alan O’Callaghan (University of Edinburgh), Paola Corrales (ANU), and cohort 2 CAKE fellow Connor Aird (UCL). Dimitri and Connor are lead authors of upcoming Software Carpentries courses on introductory Fortran and unit testing for Fortran, respectively. During the hackday, we adopted a common curriculum for the courses and considered how they fit with other existing and planned training courses for Fortran. Our project was awarded third prize following the presentation session at the end of the day.

Four men (Dimitri, Joe, Connor, Alan) posing with third prize certificates.

Hackday team receiving third place at Collaborations Workshop 2026 (minus Paola who was attending remotely)

In June, I attended Durham HPC Days, where I gave an overview of my CAKE fellowship in the Knowledge Exchange in the DRI Community session along with the other fellows from the first cohort. Later in the session, the three of us sat on a panel, chaired by Marion Weinzierl, and discussed KE in our specific domains and more broadly.

Man (Joe) in red checkered shirt giving a talk in front of slides titled 'Fortran Index - Facilitating better knowledge exchange within the Fortran Community'

Lightning talk in the Knowledge Exchange in the DRI Community session at Durham HPC Days 2026

Another session I was involved in at HPC Days was the Fortran Community Meetup session, which consisted of lightning talks and associated breakout discussions. My lighting talk acted as the announcement of the Celebrating 70 years of Fortran event, which will receive financial support from my CAKE fellowship. The event will be held at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester, UK, on 1 December 2026. This timing was chosen to align with the Computing Insights UK conference, which will be held nearby on 2-4 December. The birthday event will include small community meetings in the morning, a workshop in the afternoon, and a reception in the evening. It will act as a retrospective looking back over the successes and challenges of the past 70 years, a celebration of exciting current developments and community initiatives, and an opportunity for everyone in the community to contribute to a discussion on what we want the next 70 years to look like. Full registration will be open soon but in the meantime there is a ‘save the date’ form that you can fill in to receive updates.