Hello!

Three years. I remember writing about my first ten months at Open Targets and feeling like someone still learning the streets of a new city. That feeling is long gone.

In that post I set three goals: bring modern web tooling into Open Targets, learn Svelte, and explore Rust. Two out of three is not bad. Svelte and Rust? Honest answer — no. They stayed on the wishlist, and then the wishlist changed. I am at peace with that.

What replaced them was better. In 2022 we migrated the platform frontend to a Turbo monorepo, consolidating applications and libraries that had been living separate lives. It was one of those projects that sounds straightforward and isn't. The kind of work that teaches you more about a codebase than any feature you could build on top of it.

What I didn't predict was becoming a team lead. That shift — from being the person writing the code to being the person helping a team write better code — changes how you measure progress. You start thinking about onboarding, about technical direction, about what a pull request teaches the person reviewing it. I didn't have that perspective three years ago.

AI has also entered the picture — building an API connecting the platform to OpenAI, watching how researchers interact with it, thinking about what it changes for tools built around data exploration. That conversation is still early, but it already feels like a different kind of work.

Three years in an academic open-source project teaches you that the pace is different, the purpose is different, and the collaborators are different — in the best way. Multidisciplinary work is slow and hard and worth it.

Heading into year four with more to build.

Pura Vida!