Developer Stories

Happy New Year listeners! We are kicking off 2024 with an episode on package management and snakes, but not just any package manager - we chat with Wolf Vollprecht, Founder & CEO of prefix.dev, who has been involved in projects ranging from conda (and conda-forge) to mamba and other QuantStack projects. If you haven’t tried out their package manager pixi yet, I’m hugely enjoying it for the modern feel and speed and highly recommend giving it a whirl. And I’d keep a look out for this company - they develop in Rust and are doing some really cool work, and we can expect more exciting things to come in the future!

It’s a joy to introduce my colleague and friend, Claudia Misale, a Researcher at the IBM Watson Research Center. Claudia has a background in distributed computing and programming, and got her PhD Informatics from the Università degli Studi di Torino in Italy. In this episode, we first go back to the Middle Age of computing (when there were floppy disks!) and talk quite a bit about gaming and then dive into MPI, the Message Passing Interface and Converged Computing. Also, it might be the case that her cat is a jiu-jitsu master. Just saying. You will need to listen to the episode to find out!

In this 91st episode we talk with the benevolent dictator and creator of Snakemake Johannes Köster, who not only continues to be a leader in the bioinformatics community for software, but also is Group leader in Computer Science and Bioinformatics at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, and is the founder of BioConda and several well-known Rust and community bioinformatics software that you likely know. In this episode we hear the founding story of Snakemake and how Johannes sees his role changing, the Snakemake software changing, and exciting changes coming with Snakemake 8! 🐍️ How often do we refactor code as developers? How do we think (or work) through a design process? What are good strategies for publishing research software, and over a long period of time? Have you heard of F1000 Research? Listen to this week’s episode to find out!

Is there anything more scary than being a developer? 😱️ It’s a joy to write and share the Halloween special episode each year, and this year we take an adventure into a futuristic city, where corruption has overtaken and even science does not have a voice. We follow our protagonists through a dangerous city, battling night creatures and enjoying small moments of joy. Do you think it’s corny? Well no worries, we have candy for that! And I’ll leave it at that - Happy October and I hope you enjoy the episode!

For this 89th episode we are shifting from Life Sciences consulting to BioSciences software and workflows! I’m so excited this week to introduce you to Paolo Di Tommaso - the creator of the Nextflow workflow software, and CTO and Co-founder of Seqera Labs. Do you know how Nextflow came to be? Or why it’s in Groovy? Or what cool work Seqera labs is cooking up? We have a fun chat in this episode, talking about everything from Converged Computing and Kubernetes to storage and filesystems, multi-tenancy, and you should definitely take a listen!

This is our third (and final) interview for the Life Sciences Consulting mini-series, and we are finishing with a bang! Today we talk to Reema Baskar, Postdoctoral researcher at the Genome Institute of Singapore. Reema is studying Systems Epigenetics and Immunology, with an intention to explore the business side. We talk about the process of learning about the enterprise of science as students, grit, and how seeing this perspective can help set goals for the future. We have so much fun in this episode - talking about cellular plasticity and epigenetics via the story of Sally the Cell.

Today we invite Eric Haas on the show - our second guest in the Life Sciences Consulting mini-series. Eric got his BS in Biology from Davidson College, and has taken his journey from there to being founder and CEO of Ionic Cytometry Solutions. In this episode we talk about football, flow cytometry, and Eric’s journey from learning about a technology to loving it, and putting together his own business. And did you know that honeysuckle is an unwielding beast that can take over a forest? Me neither! And it’s surprising and hilarious. If you are business-minded or considering life sciences consulting, you will be interested to learn about Eric’s background, path, and expertise. We hope you enjoy the show!

In this second episode, Tyler has graduated, and tells the story from when he first started dipping his toes into Life Sciences Consulting to where he is today. If you think this is a trivial matter of changing an office, think again! Tyler moved from California to Germany, faced a new culture and the challenge of forming new routines and relationships, and learned a ton along the way about life, writing, consulting, and biology. If you enjoyed our first episode from last month you will definitely enjoy this genuine and introspective story of self-reflection and growth.

This episode kicks off the first in our Life Sciences consulting mini-series. We interview Tyler Burns, CEO and Founder at Burns Life Sciences Consulting. Tyler and I go way back to graduate school, and it was an amazing opportunity to hear his story about learning, life, and a discovery for a love of programming and solving interesting problems. Part I in this episode will cover Tyler’s student and learning experiences, and look out for episode 2 that dives into Tyler’s career as a Life Sciences consultant in Berlin coming your way next month!

Sara El-Gebali is a Research Data Manager at SciLifeLab, and has traveled across country lines in her work as a scientist and data manager. Along with sharing her journey today, Sara is passionate about advocacy for equity and inclusion of individuals from marginalized groups in STEM fields. We talk about the journey that one might take through an academic program, and how it influences our decisions. If you are interested in community building, good practices for data, or open since and how to make things FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperably, Reusable), this episode will be of interest to you!