I started a Life Sciences degree while I was still at Redis, out of my own interest. A year later I moved to Ultima Genomics, a DNA sequencing company, because I wanted to work where software meets biology.

Much of my work there sat in the layer where separately owned tools meet. The experiment platform was one of them: you edited a parameter file on a pull request and drove a cloud run by commenting on it, without the tooling installed on your own machine. Most of that repository’s history now belongs to other people’s experiments.

Another came out of a migration. A model was moving from TensorFlow to PyTorch, and the training data behind it sat in TensorFlow’s own record format, which PyTorch had no way to open. I wrote rustfrecord, a Rust library with Python bindings that reads those files straight into PyTorch tensors, and published it to PyPI. That let the model move without waiting for the data to move with it.

What made Ultima interesting was that the software engineers and the scientists were effectively speaking different languages, with the ML and data people somewhere in between. Being one of the few people deliberately focusing on both the engineering and the biology is what let me translate between them, and it is why so much of what I built ended up sitting at the seams.