Hello World
Welcome to my Substack, Motifs! In this Substack I hope to cover many topics, but before we get into that - this!
Me
My name is Kyle Stiers - I’m a dad to two great kids and a big nerd in all other facets of my life. Some of my passions include soccer, video games, chess, tech hardware, and dinosaurs.
My educational background is in Biochemistry (B.S. and Ph.D.), and I consider myself a structural biologist with a longtime interest in computers and programming. I’ve always been very interested in the intersection of biology and computing - so it’s a great time to be alive and in the profession for me!
About four years ago now I pivoted my career to doing a lot more programming - which has been a very rewarding switch, with many pros and cons. I will keep it at that for now, though, as I feel that could be a good story to explain in more depth later.
Currently, I am a Data Scientist working in the Gene Editing space at Bayer. Biotechnology is an amazing domain to work in with a lot of potential impact - but it also brings some interesting challenges that traditional ‘tech’ may not experience. I look forward to maybe diving into some of these topics in the future as well.
Motifs
My idea for Motifs is to share reproducible patterns that provide modular, clean interfaces at the intersection of bioinformatics, data science, and data engineering. I am sure there will be some randomness, given my crow-like attraction to shiny new technology and papers.
There are also several topics I’d like to share my learnings on as part of my professional development. For example, I’m very interested in learning Rust and Mojo to see if they can be new tools in my arsenal. In many ways - building the writing habit for this Substack will be part of my professional development as well.
Some near-term specific things I hope to post about:
NextFlow Motifs
Foundational [bio] deep-learning models
Python Motifs
Compute environment (local and cloud) Motifs
Infrastructure as Code Motifs
Learning Rust
Learning Mojo
I’ve also formulated some very early ideas on things I’d like to explore as side quests that aren’t necessarily relevant to the Motifs plan - but could still be of interest. I will do my best to always tag things, but there is a non-zero chance Motifs becomes a [tiny] second-brain.
Some possible side quests:
Game programming (Godot or Bevy)
Algorithmic trading (crypto or traditional)
Kaggle competitions
Intermediate-Advanced Discord bots and integrations
Wrapping Up
If you’re still here - thank you! I’m excited at the prospect of building a small community of similarly-interested people and hopefully learning from readers as well.
Consider subscribing to Motifs!