Another year passes...

So, another work year has passed. With it including my 10th anniversary at The Sanger Institute, and 2 years as officially a software developer, and a change of team leader, its been a pretty full year.

So, what have I achieved:

Well, first off, I decided to split up a project which helped us a lot, as we have been able to be more agile in changes and bug fixes when dealing with parts of our pipelines and code.

Following the change of leader in our team, we started to spend some time looking at new technologies. I started to take a look message queues. See Stomping on the Rabbit and Pt2.
This was my first time at actually properly failing something. It felt good. I got lots of help from monadic and their team down in London relating to RabbitMQ, and we tried ActiveMQ as well. But the reason we failed it: after attempting a comprehensive test suite to test cases where servers go down, we decided that (at this time) it wasn't stable enough for passing around the code as reliably as we hoped. I spent about 3 weeks looking at this, but we believe that is time well spent. (Another team started to employ it directly, but continually had problems with their poller of a queue.)

I also spent some time at this time taking a look at Erlang, but since there didn't seem to be much opportunity to apply this at work, I stopped for the time being.

I then deployed the badminton ladder I was working on for the Sports and Social Club. See Playing Badminton through Clearpress. This has gone down well, although I do need to make some improvements to the interface.

We had been deliberating about making the analysis pipeline pluggable, so I took this task on. I also used it as a chance to take a good look at Moose as an O-O framework. I have pretty much spent the rest of the year doing this.

This had had me really excited, and probably the thing which has kept me most interested in my job for the last 6 months, and also one thing which proved I didn't waste my time splitting up the project earlier in the year.

After much discussion of whether to relaunch scripts, or load everything to LSF in one go, we went for something that does as much as it can, then submits jobs sequentially to LSF, but with code being as decoupled as possible. You can see in the powerpoint presentation Pluggable Pipelines the style we took. With the power of the Moose behind it utilising Roles and even developing my own CPAN extensions MooseX::File_or_DB::Storage and MooseX::AttributeCloner.

With this pluggable pipeline setup, of course it is now multiple times easier to add new stuff, particularly QC testing. So, we need a way to display the results. The new boss is keen on Catalyst, so I decided now is the time to look at this. Whilst this project has moved onto another team member, I gave it a bit of a start, initially to see how it would deal with getting stuff from a file server rather than a database 'Backending Catalyst'. A couple of book sources later and I get a working app up. In fact, really, the biggest challenge was tring to apply some css that I stole from two Rails apps.

I pass my 10 year anniversary without a hitch, it seems. It is funny to find that I have worked somewhere for 10 years. Although saying that, I have done a number of different roles here, from washing glassware to sequencing dna, to instituting the widespread use of Transposon Insertion Libraries in finishing, to Quality Control, to Software Development.

And then the slope to Christmas. The pipeline systems aim to be flexible has now been pushed to the limit, with virtually unreported changes to the 3rd party pipeline which it has had to keep up with - and whilst the code unavoidably has to change, we have spent most time discussing the planned changes to cope, and testing it, rather than coding.

I've also had to come to the decision that I think Class::Std is well and truly dead. RIP. You helped me become a better, O-O programmer, and you will be remembered with a fondness, but Moose has just dealt you too many blows.

Overall, it has been quite a productive agile year. I'm taking a look at the C language and trying to lobby to get a course run at work on Moose and Catalyst. Hopefully, these will be big things for me next year. I look forward to it.

Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year to all.