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gealarcon profile image
Geo

I got my BS in Bioengineering. I took one programming course in MATLAB (haha) and despised it so much that I told myself that I could never be a software engineer. When I got my first job as a lab researcher, I was required to code in MATLAB to operate some machinery and process my data. I began to love it because I was actually doing something useful with it. I started to like coding more than my actual job that I began to teach myself how to code. Now I plan to continue my career in the lab automation space or be a pure software engineer who works at a biotech company.

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arikaturika profile image
Arika O

Sounds interesting, what is the stack you're interested in? Good luck with the learning :)!

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gealarcon profile image
Geo • Edited

We started with just MATLAB, but moved over to python because the licensing fee was expensive and to be more aligned with industry. Also, the rest of our lab's software is written in python so the integration of other software would be easier.

Our stack is pretty simple: python, mySQL, and javascript.
We have a couple of web apps to visualize our data live and make changes to our experiments on the go.

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thompcd profile image
Corey Thompson

Cool, @geo ! It sounds like our experiences were very similar, but mine in EE. I’m doing a lot of automation now too. What are you automating in the lab? Are you still in Matlab? I’ve still never used it outside of academics.

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gealarcon profile image
Geo

We moved over to a python based code which I love much more! We are currently automating large liquid handlers to adapt bacteria cells to a new environment.

We also have smaller machines to automate a lot of repetitive bench lab work such as extracting DNA from cells.

What are you automating?

 
thompcd profile image
Corey Thompson

That’s pretty cool! So does that involve dispense/extraction and temperature types of things? Are you using Python on a pi? Is this custom equipment or do they sell robots off the shelf for that stuff that you’re integrating?

My most recent projects include digitizing assembly instructions and adding physical sensors as interlocks in each step, I work in manufacturing for electronics. Imagine building lots of variations of desktop computers and needing to ensure every part is inserted in the proper order and have smart cameras and different sensors to check. We use C#, JavaScript and PLC’s as the core platform.