From Software Engineering to Evolutionary Biology

The chapter follows the speaker's transition from a career in software engineering in Silicon Valley to pursuing their passion for evolutionary biology in academia. They discuss the convergence of their diverse background in software engineering and biology, focusing on the evolution of Slim from a tool for population geneticists to a platform for modeling multiple species and ecological interactions. The discussion explores the components of the slim ecosystem, behavior modeling through scripting in ADOS, physics simulations, genetic algorithms, agent-based modeling principles, and decision-making processes in evolutionary models.