High-altitude hacking

By Siyuan Wang, Symbio Labs

I was reading the BioCommons monthly newsletter when I saw a call out to go to the Australian Outpost of the 2023 BioHackathon. It struck me as a great opportunity to brush up on my coding skills - my current role doesn’t require in depth bioinformatics coding, but I love to code! I write code to solve small but tedious problems that I come across all the time.

When I arrived in Brisbane, I was blown away by the view from our hacking room and made sure to take some photos of the city landscape. It was an inspiring space to work with the group from around Australia, and to link up live online with the European participants. 

Once we started hacking the first thing I needed to do was identify the challenges in our project. There was lots of reading about new bioinformatics tools that I hadn’t come across before. Then it was straight into some good old-fashioned problem solving using Python and git. I enjoyed working as a big collaborative team - it was a nice change of pace from my usual work which is usually in smaller groups. I even got a chance to dabble in web development and get creative!

The Outpost was a perfect opportunity to meet new people in a similar field and I got to work on exciting projects that I wouldn’t normally have had a chance to do. I would definitely recommend others get involved next year! 

Above: A selection of scenic photos I took in Brisbane.