Seqera

Nextflow on the Road — ISMB 2024 in Montreal

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A small but intrepid team of Seqerans recently attended the ISMB 2024 conference in Montreal, a great mix of computational biology and bioinformatics with a largely academic / research-focused audience. Join Geraldine Van der Auwera, Rob Syme and Florian Wuennemann for a lively discussion about the scientific themes of the conference, their experience running a booth, meeting with the ISMB and BOSC community, and resources for job seekers.

Podcast overview

Scientific themes / Favorite talks and takeaways

  • AI is everywhere! And actually starting to produce useful results, bubble notwithstanding.
  • Pangenomes are cool.
  • Multimodal data (graphs, spatial, etc) is cool too!
  • Francesco Lescai’s talk in the BioInfo-Core track was awesome (slight bias from the Nextflowers here)

Running the Nextflow/Seqera booth

  • We got tons of visitors to the booth! Interesting bimodal distribution of current Nextflow users + newcomers interested in moving to Nextflow.
  • Interesting questions about what is Seqera, what does the platform do, how does the business work given its OSS foundation.
  • We ran a raffle that required visitors to run a Nextflow pipeline for a chance to win a pair of AirPods. (A PhD student won the AirPods, which made us very happy.)

Sponsoring the BOSC track/COSI

  • We were the Platinum sponsor for BOSC (Bioinformatics Open Source Conference) which used to be a separate event and is now co-organized as a COSI track of ISMB. The sponsorship mostly funds travel for people who otherwise couldn’t attend the conference.
  • We made special limited edition Nextflow-BOSC socks!
  • BOSC is awesome and you should join them next year at ISMB 2025 in Liverpool.

Jobs!

  • We met a lot of early-career job seekers at the ISMB career fair and shared some advice & recommendations: get engaged in nf-core to develop and demonstrate your skills, and check out the jobs channels in the nf-core and nextflow slack workspaces.
  • Bioinformatics job postings increasingly cite Nextflow experience as a desired or even required skill. Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn for a weekly roundup of Nextflow-related job postings
  • Our Community team will be looking for a new EU-based developer advocate in the near future; reach out to Geraldine on LinkedIn if you’re interested.

Upcoming events mentioned in the podcast