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7 posts tagged with "technical"

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Development in Steps: Learning to Collaborate on a Technical Project

· 3 min read
Basil Yusef
LINCS Computer Science Undergraduate Research Assistant

Unsplash

LINCS is using ResearchSpace as a platform for exploring relationships in interlinked cultural datasets. With ResearchSpace, researchers can browse, search, and visualize data in the LINCS datastore. In summer 2022, I was part of a team that was developing new features for LINCS’s version of ResearchSpace.

Our team was a collaboration between contributors with a background in user experience (UX) and contributors with a background in software development. We worked in tandem: the UX group recommended features to improve the experience of using the web application. These recommendations were turned into tickets in GitLab. The tickets described what the desired end product would be, and it was up to the developers to determine how to achieve this goal. The development lead shared tickets out among the software developers, dividing them up based on what would be required to build the suggested features...

Diving into Large-Scale Projects as a Complete Novice

· 4 min read
Dawson MacPhee
LINCS Computer Science Co-op

Roozebeh Eslami Unsplash

When beginning my very first co-op job search, I had no idea what employers would expect from me. It was a daunting task looking through the job postings and deciding what I thought I’d be (somewhat) qualified for. After a few job interviews, I applied to join the LINCS project, feeling confident that my skills aligned with the job requirements. Eventually, I was offered and accepted a job from LINCS, beginning a journey that has challenged my technical abilities every day and has expanded far past what I originally thought I’d be doing...

Invisible Design

· 6 min read
Amardeep Singh
LINCS Computer Science Co-op

Art Wireframe

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer—that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” - Steve Jobs

If you are a developer, designer, or a creative individual interested in design, you are probably familiar with the phrase “good design is invisible.” Everything is designed—there is thought behind every project or product—but only a few things are designed well. When design is done poorly everyone tends to notice its flaws, but when design is done well it usually goes unnoticed...

What Is Extract Transform Load?

· 4 min read
Justin Francis
LINCS Junior Programmer

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In data science there is a commonly used process called Extract-Transform-Load (ETL). ETL involves three main steps:

  1. Extract data from a source,
  2. Transform the data via data cleansing and data manipulation, and
  3. Load the transformed data to a data warehouse (the final collection of data) (Sethi, 2018)

Before having much experience in data processing, my colleague Devon and I were not sure what ETL was. Now, after jointly transforming an entire dataset from XML to a whole new structure utilizing triples using CIDOC CRM, we’re beginning to understand the process...

Kubernetes Storage on Compute Canada: A Case for Longhorn

· 4 min read
Pieter Botha
LINCS Technical Manager

Laptop

As a Cyberinfrastructure project funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, LINCS is building its infrastructure on the resources of Compute Canada which operates a Cloud service run with OpenStack.

Cinder is the default volume storage provider for virtual machines provisioned on the OpenStack platform of Compute Canada. It is the last layer of a complex multi-tenant system that abstracts Ceph storage and hypervisors on top of hard disk drives. It is, however, the closest you can get to the network-attached storage (NAS) system of Compute Canada...