Improving Software Together - Meet the team behind these pages

We are a group of bioinformatics trainees (PhD students and postdocs) at the University of Oslo who decided to get better programmers to improve their science. It probably all started when Anthony established a platform for code sharing when he created his lab. Then Kata “katalyzed" the process of creating more formal meetings by trainees for trainees when she joined the group.

As a lucky accident, before her PhD, Kata spent a year studying software engineering and management as a short break from bioinformatics research. There she met Francisco, an associate professor in software engineering who pointed out that most bioinformatics tools need to catch up to what current software engineering standards can offer. It is very hard to unsee things. Especially when poor software quality directly impacts the everyday life of all computational biologists. Soon, it turned out that there was also an existing literature of findings that identified software issues and offered solutions. But it also became obvious that practicing bioinformaticians only know about these if they look for it. Once she started her PhD journey, it made sense to share the insights and learn from others within regular meetings discussing bioinformatics software quality.

These meetings became popular fairly quickly, and they evolved over the past three years (as of 2024) and were shaped by their members. We started to experiment with workshops, topics, and eventually code reviews. We kept what worked and abandoned what did not. After the second year, we felt we had something good going on. It took another year of discussions to identify "why" it is good and "what" it is exactly that works. The core team who went through the distillation of the ideas and wrote a letter to the editor and created this webpage includes Kata, Ieva, Vipin, and Ladislav. Our group leaders who support our journey are Anthony and Marieke. Several members regularly attend these meetings, providing insights, participating in lively discussions, and helping with solutions.

Ladislav Hovan

Vipin Kumar

Katalin Ferenc

Ieva Rauluseviciute

Anthony Mathelier

Marieke Kuijjer