DEV Community: Carlos Cruz

Join the Open Targets Hackathon: Celebrating 10 Years of Innovation in Target Discovery

Carlos Cruz — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 10:35:00 +0000

The Open Targets Platform is turning 10, and we're throwing a celebration that's perfect for developers, scientists, and bioinformatics enthusiasts! We invite you to join our two-day hackathon, where your coding skills can make a real impact in drug discovery.

Why This Hackathon Matters

The Open Targets Platform integrates evidence from genome-wide association studies, functional genomics, rare disease genetics, somatic mutations, and machine learning models to systematically build target-disease associations. The Platform has recently undergone a significant transformation, uniting genetic evidence and target discovery information into a single resource with state-of-the-art machine learning models and comprehensive variant annotation. Your contributions could directly influence the discovery of the next generation of safe and effective therapeutic drugs, with evidence informing pharmaceutical pipelines worldwide.

What's in it for Developers?

Real-World Impact: Develop solutions that can be integrated into the pipelines used by pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers worldwide.

Cutting-Edge Data: Work with massive genomics datasets, machine learning models, and statistical genetics pipelines.

Expert Mentorship: Get direct guidance from leading experts in genomics, drug discovery, and bioinformatics throughout the event.

Open Source: All projects are open source (CC-BY/ Apache 2), meaning your work contributes to the global scientific community.

Project Ideas We're Excited About

Data Integration: Build new pipelines or improve existing ones for integrating diverse biological datasets
Interactive Visualisations: Create dashboards or novel ways to explore complex genomics data
Machine Learning: Develop models for target prioritisation or automated analysis
Platform Extensions: Add new features or tools that integrate with the existing platform

Two Ways to Participate

In-Person (Limited to 40 spots): Join us at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridge, UK, with direct mentoring, networking opportunities, and catered meals.

Virtual (limited to 60 spots): Access all live-streamed sessions with dedicated virtual collaboration rooms and online Q&A with experts.

Key Dates

Registration Deadline: October 12, 2025
Hackathon: October 21-22, 2025 — Two full days of coding, collaboration, and innovation

Ready to Make an Impact?

Whether you're a seasoned bioinformatics developer or curious about applying your coding skills to biology, this hackathon offers the perfect opportunity to contribute to meaningful research while expanding your expertise.

The intersection of software engineering and drug discovery is where the next breakthrough might happen — and it could be yours.

Only 40 in-person spots available - they're filling up fast!

Register now: In-Person | Virtual

Submit your project idea: Project Submission Form

Questions? Contact us at outreach@opentargets.org
More info: https://www.opentargets.org/hackathon

Join us in celebrating a decade of innovation and help shape the next 10 years of target discovery.

Calling front-end developers looking to collaborate on a large open-source application!

Carlos Cruz — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Help Open Targets refactor our codebase from standard Javascript to Typescript.

Open Targets is a public-private partnership whose ultimate aim is to improve the success rate of discovering new medicines; designing and testing new therapies is currently a lengthy, costly process with a low success rate.

Our seven academic and pharmaceutical partner institutions collaborate on experimental research projects designed to identify causal links between drug targets and diseases, and informatics frameworks that systematically identify and prioritise targets for drug development. We are committed to making our data, methods, and results publicly available as soon as possible, and we value open collaboration.

Among our flagship informatics products is the Open Targets Platform. The Platform is an open source data integration and analysis tool, integrating over 20 public data sources which are used to build and score associations between targets and diseases. The Platform is regularly updated, with five releases every year.

We are looking for open-source contributors to help us refactor our UI codebase to from standard Javascript to Typescript.

This is a great project for junior developers who are looking to collaborate on a production-running application build with leading-edge technologies such as React, GraphQL, and Turbo. This work will help us spot bugs earlier and improve the readability and longevity of our codebase. Typescript also has the advantage of rich IDE support and cross-platform and cross-browser compatibility.

For more details, take a look at the issue on our GitHub and/or feel free to reach me to carlos.cruz@ebi.ac.uk.

styled terminal with iTerm

Carlos Cruz — Thu, 08 Aug 2019 16:09:32 +0000

New iTerm2 version 3.3.1 comes with a complete new and good looking features.

I just shared a tweet about how my terminal looks and immediately start receiving some questions about how to get there.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1158789431047966723-711'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1158789431047966723&theme=dark" }

ok, so let's start!

Getting start

Disclaimer: if you have installed iTerm 3.3.1, zsh, oh-my-zsh and spaceship_prompt jump to configuration section

iTerm2

To start, we need to download and install iTerm.
Follow the steps as a normal application.

ZSH

Zsh is a shell designed for interactive use, although it is also a powerful scripting language

This is a may pain full step, and this would change depending on your configuration. So the best I can do is share the most complete guide that I found to do it - Installing zsh

Oh-my-zsh

Oh My Zsh is an open source, community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration

Use the official documentations of Oh-my-zsh to install it - Installing oh-my-zsh

You can get deeper in oh-my-zsh and their configuration, but this is not the scope of this post. So the most important you need to understand about it is his entry configuration file. ~/.zshrc here you can control themes and plugins.

spaceship-prompt

Spaceship is a minimalistic, powerful and extremely customizable Zsh prompt

Follow the installation options in spaceship-prompt project - spaceship-prompt installation

Configuration

Ok so now our iTerm should be looking nice. But we can add some configuration to get here:

tabs in left panel

To change the tabs to be located at left, just go to iTerm > Preferences > Appearance there, in General you will see Tab bar location, set that to Left

You also can customize the icon and session title, to do that, simple go to iTerm > Preferences > Profiles, General and in Basics section going to see the Icon and Title inputs.

status bar

This is a new super cool ui improvement of iTerm, to enabled it go to iTerm > Preferences > Profiles then in the left sub sections go to Session. There at the bottom, you will find the enabled check and the configuration link, where you can customize which components put on your bar. It's simple just drag and drop the components.

To change the location of the bar, just go to iTerm > Preferences > Appearance, there in General you will see Status bar location, set that to Bottom

customize spaceship-prompt

Well this is like a bonus, in my case I wanted that the git branch indicator only shows in status bar, so I had to disable it in spaceship-prompt. To do that, go to you zsh config file(~/.zshrc in normal case) and add this config flag

SPACESHIP_GIT_BRANCH_SHOW="false"

Save the changes and restart iTerm

Thanks for read! If have any questions or comments leave bellow 🙂

Pura vida 🇨🇷✌🏼

Susi zsh + iterm theme

Carlos Cruz — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 19:58:35 +0000

My first post in dev.to to share my iterm + zsh theme

Installation

First you need to clone or download the susi-zsh-iterm repo

Theme

Drop susi.zsh-theme into the ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/themes/ directory (simply create the themes directory if it does not exist)
Change the theme variable name to ZSH_THEME="susi" in ~/.zshrc
Reload the terminal (ZSH with source ~/.zshrc)

Colors

Open Preferences pane on the Profiles tab in iTerm
Switch to the Colors tab and import the susi.itermcolors (you will find this option in a drop-down in the lower right corner)

Font

My recommended font is Incosolata. You can find it here

Enjoy ✌🏼
Made in 🇨🇷