Hello, again

The first version of this site was a Bootstrap template I copy-pasted somewhere between finishing my PhD in São Paulo and packing for the next continent. It had broken links, lorem ipsum I never replaced, and a sidebar item called "My genome S2 code Life" that I still don't fully remember writing.

That site stayed online for five years. People did, somehow, still find me through it. So I want to start by saying thank you — to anyone who emailed about a paper, a pipeline, or a job, after clicking through what was, objectively, a 2020 template with a broken contact form.

What this site is now

A working portfolio. The research, the code, the papers, the projects in flight. Some photography, some writing, the occasional poem when I can convince myself to publish one. A blog I will try, against my better instincts, to actually keep updated.

The site is intentionally simple — static HTML, one CSS file, one small JS file. No framework, no build step. It deploys to GitHub Pages on a push. I spend my days writing complicated software; my personal site doesn't have to be.

Why now

Two reasons.

The first is that the work itself has changed. When I built that first portfolio I was finishing a PhD and not entirely sure where I was going. Today the work is concrete: AMRnet and TyphiNET are live, used, and cited. Smaller projects — Dragon, CNVRock, PlasmidNet — are starting to take shape. I wanted somewhere honest to point people.

The second is that I keep meeting younger scientists, particularly from Brazil and other LMIC contexts, who reach out asking how to do this kind of work. This kind of work meaning: bioinformatics that's also software engineering, public-health relevance, open source. The honest answer is messy — I trained as a computer scientist, then did a master's and PhD in bioinformatics, then worked at three institutions across three continents, then learned modern web stacks on the side. There's no clean path. But there's a path. I want somewhere to write that down, slowly.

What you'll find here

• Project deep-dives — how AMRnet works, what's hard about it, what we got wrong.
• Notes on tools — Snakemake, Nextflow, Trycycler, Kleborate, the ones I actually use.
• Career bits, especially for people moving between bench and code.
• Occasional creative things. A camera, a microphone, a notebook — I keep them around.

If you want to follow along, the easiest way is through GitHub or X / Twitter. And if there's something specific you'd like me to write about, the contact details are at the bottom of the home page.

For pleasure without pressure ✨

— Louise