The Bluesky workshop attendees at the CFEL building's staircase. Photo credit: Zeynep I. Isik Dursun
[More]The ROCK-IT Bluesky Workshop, held from 5–7 November 2025 at the DESY campus in Hamburg, brought together more than 60 participants from the synchrotron light source control community.
The three-day event provided a valuable platform for sharing knowledge, exploring new tools, and developing collaborative solutions to common challenges in the field. The program featured sessions on bridging Bluesky tools into the Bluesky ecosystem, Bluesky and Ophyd (-Async) tutorial sessions, tool-specific sessions, and community-presentations. The program also featured breakout discussions and poster sessions, offering a balanced mix of theory and hands-on learning.
Attendees from all experience levels found the workshop valuable — from newcomers gaining practical insights to developers exploring new directions for large-scale facilities such as PETRA IV:
“The ROCK-IT Bluesky workshop was very informative and it was great to connect with people from other synchrotrons. As a newcomer to the field, I learnt a lot, especially from the tutorials. The step-by-step guidance and exercises helped soldify my understanding of key Bluesky/ophyd-async concepts which will undoubtedly help me in my current and future projects at Diamond."
Shreelakshmi Iyengar, Graduate Software Engineer, Diamond Light Source
“The workshop was a great opportunity to explore new ideas and possibilities for control systems, especially in the context of PETRA IV. It also offered a valuable chance to connect with other groups.”
Yuelong Yu, Scientist, DESY FS-EC
“The talks, discussions, and practice sessions provided a great opportunity to understand the current software landscape.”
Irina Voloshina, Security Engineer, DESY IT
The organizer of the workshop, Devin Burke (Software research scientist, DESY FS-EC), emphasized the importance of this workshop in building a community in the field which will lead to future collaborations:
“It was incredible to see such a great variety of discussions from the Controls community. We had attendees from 17 different institutions across 8 countries from a diverse range of fields including photon and neutron sources, technical institutes, research groups, and universities. This workshop was a rare opportunity to compare notes and talk shop with our colleagues in a way that can't be replicated with remote video calls and forums. Our meeting certainly created many new connections and avenues for collaboration across our community and I hope we can continue to work together to deliver powerful, user-friendly, and flexible experiment controls and interactivity solutions.”
The ROCK-IT team thanks all participants and contributors for making the workshop a platform for valuable exchange. The team also thanks CFEL for providing the venue for the workshop, and Matthias Kreuzeder and his team for the organizational support.