About me

Since 2021, the focus of Goodwright has been on developing our Genomics data platform - Flow. Flow, created in collaboration with Professor Jernej Ule's lab, is a tool for performing complex Bioinformatics analysis using an intuitive web interface, with the data outputs visualised, organised, and shareable.

My role here has been in creating the software itself - the backend, the frontend, its deployment, database, and backup infrastructure etc., as well as managing its deployments in different enviornments. It has made me a fundamentally different software developer.

We initially used Goodwright to develop lab websites for labs around the UK - as a side project while we completed our PhDs. We still host and maintain these - the Branco Lab here in London, the Rochefort Lab in Edinburgh, and the Hebenstreit Lab in Warwick.

We still occasionally create these, having recently created the website for the multi-lab SIDB Institute in Ediburgh, and the new Nottingham RNA Cluster.

Throughout my PhD I sought as many opportunities as time would allow to teach Python and other coding topics. I love explaining this stuff and bringing in new programmers.

This was mostly done through demonstrating work at both UCL and Birkbeck, and I also taught sessions as the Tech Officer for UCL MedTech society in 2018/19.

Towards the end of my final year at Edinburgh, I threw myseif into coding side projects in a way I hadn't really before. One of these was pyChats, a Python library for analysing your chat backups (Whatsapp, Facebook etc.) and producing a Markov Model message generator which would speak like your friends. Another was election15 - a web page which modelled different outcomes of the 2015 UK general election that happened around this time.

These projects and their writeups got some traction that I hadn't anticipated, but also were much more fulfilling to work on than either my actual degree, or the more abstract 'learning exercises' I'd done up until this point. It was the first time I really considered that maybe I could do coding as my actual job, rather than as a hobby. This was a big inflection point for me.

I was a member of Edinburgh's iGEM team in 2014.

iGEM is a worldwide Synthetic Biology competition for university teams, who form teams of ten or so students to spend a summer working on making a genetically engineered system to do something useful. The teams go to Boston in October to present their work to the world, which is exactly what we did in October.

Our project was to create synthetic communities of bacteria where each species functioned as a logic gate and which communicated through secreted chemicals. I worked in the lab, and also worked on RNA simulation.

I've always liked writing, so writing for Edinburgh's Student Newspaper seemed like the best way to get into something outside of the course itself. I wrote for the Science section from 2013 on, and co-ran that section as its editor for most of 2014.

Having to regularly work to deadlines that work on cycles of three or five days (rather than the weeks or months I'd been used to) was a good habit to get into.

In the four months between dropping out of Medicine in January, and leaving London in May, there was a lot of hanging around feeling quite sorry for myself, with not much purpose - especially when it became clear that it would be eighteen months before I could start a new course.

Desperate for any kind of project that would give me a sense of working towards something, I decided to get back into coding - something I'd let slip away a little over the past year or two. I picked up a 'Guide to programming with Python' - a language I'd never heard of - and slipped back into it. By and large, I've never slipped back out since then, and Python remains the language I do most of my work in.

I ended up doing the International Baccalaureate at the end of School, which my school offered as an alternative to A-Levels. I was pretty set on going to medical school at this point (the coding was just a hobby, and one I had less time for by these last two years). It was exhausting, but really rewarding.

To this day, I have more stress dreams about the IB exams than anything I've done more recently.

I started learning to code when I was 15, in 2006. I wanted to know how websites were actually made, and followed an online tutorial for learning first HTML, then CSS, and then a little Javascript. I can still very vividly recall the feeling of exhileration I felt when I got a page to change colour when a button was clicked - a feeling which came from the two facets of it that motiviate me to this day: the feeling of power that comes from knowing you can build anything you can imagine, and the satisfaction of understanding how things actually work.

I also learned some Java, and some VBA around this time. An odd cocktail of languages to start out with, but I learned a huge amount from them.