Welcome to our blog, welcome in our world. We are a team of software engineers, infrastructure specialists and bioinformaticians building infrastructures and tools used by cancer researchers around the world.
This blog is our opportunity to share with the world how we tackle challenges, find solutions, share our knowledge. All of this applicable not only to cancer research, but to IT in general.
An idea
Discussions on this topic were triggered by a couple of very interesting sprint demos in which team members showed us solutions and walked us through challenges they faced.
With very limited documentation available online on those particular topics, it was clear we had knowledge worth sharing with the world.
We have a mandate to share and open-source our software, but further than that, we believe that sharing how we got to that new software version, this cloud infrastructure, or this particular piece of implementation, is also very relevant.
A technical platform
Implementing a blog comes with its own sets of challenges, from ease of contribution to maintainability.
Our group has expertise with 2 types of content-publishing platforms; CMS (such as Drupal) and Statics website generators (such as MKDocs or Jekyll). CMS platforms provide greater flexibility and capabilities, but are also much more complex to maintain (especially from a security standpoint). Static website generators are easier to operate (no databases, no server-side code), with content being added following a git workflow developers are familiar with.
We decided to move ahead with Jekyll as a static website generator because of its native support by GitHub pages. We can then rely on Github for building, hosting and maintaining the platform. The team will only need to focus on the content itself.
A blog
Today this blog is open to the world, the team will be contributing regularly and welcome external contributions.
This blog is yours!
