This guest post from Madeleine Bonsma, genomics graduate student at the University of Toronto, and lead on Collaborate’s Phage Parser project.
Mozilla Science Lab’s Toronto Open Science Code Sprint (March 7-8, 2015) was great fun and, in my opinion, a great success. The weekend was packed with collaboration between projects, mutual encouragement and assistance, and a great supportive and productive atmosphere.
I was impressed by how quickly many people jumped into new projects and started producing results; I had the chance to work with Natchar Ratanasirigulchai, a co-op student at the University of British Columbia pursuing a combined honors degree in Biology and Computer Science. As a first-time code sprint attendee, I thought two days wouldn’t be very much time to get something done with people I’ve never met. I was very wrong about that! I now have a heightened interest in seeking out new collaborations with people from diverse backgrounds.
I participated in the code sprint on the Pathogens and Disease Immunity project. By the end of the weekend we had completed most of our goals and made good progress on others, culminating in a demo visualization of bacteria-phage interactions captured in the CRISPR locus. Find out more about our project and others on the Mozilla Collaborate website. It’s all open, and contributors are always welcome!