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Hi there 👋

Welcome to my blog. This serves mainly as a quick reference for myself on how I did certain things but I hope you find some of it useful!

How to Handle Big Data Uploads in Django

Traditional File Uploads in Django Handling non-trivial big data file uploads (think >5gb/file) in Django can be challenging. A typical file upload storage strategy in Django is to use django-storages and an Amazon S3 backend. In the traditional way, your browser uploads the file directly to Django which then transmits the data to S3. This creates two problems: Django needs to have enough memory to hold your uploaded file for retransmission....

December 10, 2023 · 2 min · 225 words · Shaun Chuah

Launching Nextflow Pipelines From the Cloud

Why bother setting up another server to manage your Nextflow pipeline? Avoid premature termination of the pipeline. When you run a Nextflow pipeline from your local computer, your local computer is managing the tasks and communicating with Azure as jobs are completed. Depending on the complexity of your pipeline, this may be a long time (couple of days!). If your wi-fi router accidentally comes unplug or the connection is broken, the pipeline will terminate prematurely....

April 28, 2022 · 4 min · 781 words · Shaun Chuah

Setting Up Azure With Nextflow

We will cover getting your nextflow pipeline up and running in the cloud using Azure. First thing to note, this process will take some time so sit back, grab a coffee and take your time working through each section. Useful References Nextflow documentation here. Nextflow blog post here. 1. Context Let’s start with some context. I’m working with a small team of immunology researchers who are following their scientific questions which has led into genomics....

August 18, 2021 · 10 min · 1949 words · Shaun Chuah

How to Create Your Bioinformatics Pipeline with Nextflow

Now that you know how to run bioinformatics software in Docker containers, it’s time to connect them up. If you’ve missed the last post the link is here: Getting started with Docker for bioinformatics. Content Overview What is a pipeline? Nextflow vs Snakemake Using Nextflow and Docker containers to create your pipeline Summary What is a pipeline anyway? The term ‘pipeline’ is thrown around a lot in bioinformatics. In simple terms, it refers to the programs that have to be run in a certain order to complete the analysis....

August 12, 2021 · 7 min · 1311 words · Shaun Chuah

Getting Started With Docker for Bioinformatics

Next generation sequencing is becoming much more accessible to researchers in 2021. As you stare at the freshly minted .fastq files, you’re wondering - how do I go about analysing this? After a stint on Google, you decide that you want to run bwa-mem/bowtie2 and then send the output into samtools. Next thing you know, you’re trying to install half a dozen bioinformatic programs on your new ubuntu machine. You run into dependency hell or else conda seems to be stuck solving god knows what and this quickly eats up half your day....

August 5, 2021 · 2 min · 425 words · Shaun Chuah

Architectural Approaches to Building Websites

This article is for people who are new to web development, lost in the myriad of web frameworks and are asking themselves: What are the real differences in the frameworks? Having spent the last year getting up to speed with the state of the web, I’m going to summarise the 4 major architectural approaches to launching a new website in 2021. Although I describe them as discrete categories, in reality they exist on a continuum and some frameworks will blur the lines between these categories (eg....

July 1, 2021 · 4 min · 752 words · Shaun Chuah

The State of Web Development

I’ve had to dabble in a bit of web development over the past year as part of my research fellowship and having not done this for a while, I have accrued a couple of thoughts I want to share. My background First, a bit of background. Growing up, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing the birth and evolution of the modern internet. From the days of 56kbps dial-up modems which gets taken out by lightning(!...

June 29, 2021 · 4 min · 746 words · Shaun Chuah