This week felt like a bit of a detour, but in a good way. Being part of a programme such as ARISE is wonderful as there are carefully designed activities and thoughtfully designed process documents to read. Part of a day was taken up with that side of things.

I've also introduced some dedicated reading time into my week. There are so many interesting papers/preprints to read on MHC:peptide:TCR interactions, and it was good to spend some time reading them rather than just adding them to my reading list!

I was also preparing, attending and writing up notes for a fascinating workshop with immunologists in Oxford. It was a workshop held under a rule of no public disclosure of the contents, so it's inappropriate to discuss, but it was fascinating to see how many of my defined intitial user needs were validated.

Again, another slightly short week due to some annual leave. Looking forward to a week of solid development next week.

This week I actually started work on a new feature/improvement to the data. This feels like a wonderful thing to do as it's now been a month since I started the fellowship.

Before starting to add new features or work on new projects, it's always good to take stock and to think about refactoring (improving the codebase) and looking at what foundations need to be built.

The PID template is still in the process of being refined but has been very useful to think through the possible places to start and understand which tasks/projects are dependent upon each other. From this analysis there are two clear first tasks which are quite foundational to work going forwards:

You can start some things straight away, but when there are multiple things you could do, prioritising and working out what the things are is crucial to avoid too much context switching. For those of us used to agile, PIDs (Product Initiation Documents) feel like things from the "waterfall past", but I think they're still relevant if they're made to reflect user needs that is at the core of any agile methodology.

I started the ARISE fellowship, which runs for three years on the 16th January 2023. I'm now on the Wellcome Genome Campus in the European Bioinformatics Institute, with OpenTargets as my host group and an association with the PDB in Europe group. Having been a remote worker for much of the pandemic, having a desk and being with colleagues is lovely. It's even more wonderful to be back amongst scientists for the whole week after working as an independent researcher for the last year and a half and working in the technology sector before that.

Hello, welcome to the weeknotes for the "histo" project. First an introduction and some background.