Ask HN: Are you interested in building devtools/infra for science?

3 points by rorytbyrne 36 days ago | 3 comments

I used to be a regular backend developer, then I started a biology PhD. It seems like lots of people do computational work, but the landscape of devtools is pretty sparse. This is slowly changing (partly due to new AI-for-science interest), but it feels like there's still lots of low-hanging fruit to be built.

E.g. data infrastructure, declarative tooling for experiments, visualisation tooling, data sharing/exchange services, provenance infrastructure for threading data generation through to ML model training, protocols for lab equipment, etc.

So I'm wondering if people on the more traditional side of tech are interested in building devtools/infra for science, what you see as the main barriers, whether there's anything specific you'd like to build, and what would help you get started?

For those working in science, I'm also curious what tools you'd like to see built, and whether you'd be willing to collaborate with an engineer to make them happen?

sibidharan 36 days ago |

I built one and about to open-source it in a few months: https://labs.selfmade.ninja

This lives in my academy atm - but you can signup for free and try it out. This is a DevOps infra for higher educational research - right now focused on Cybersecurity, IoT, Software Engineering, AI Workflows.

But this can be customised to whatever you want to run - because all I provide is a mini self-hosted AWS for EdTech that gives you MicroVMs, VPN, Hosting, AI Based learning and evaluation tools, all gamified. It can generate Roadmaps and link them to lessons you can then try on labs! So a lab can be anything you want to be!

You looking for something like this? Am I anywhere near?

rorytbyrne 36 days ago | |

This is more on the ed-tech side right? I'm thinking more tooling to help a synthetic biologist design a protein, or a DARPA PM integrate the research activities of the labs they fund.

sibidharan 36 days ago | | |

Yes, this deployment more of EdTech! But what tools you are willing to run decides the deployment nature. What makes it EdTech-ish is the type of labs it has now. If you have a tool that you want to run on linux and access via browser/port, then this is a right architecture. Rest is all networking and compute instances talk to each other.

So you need to tell which tooling you want, and I might be able to configure it. I am no biologist, but an engineer who understands DevOps.