Mychro

09/04/2020

An X-Ray for your DNA

Under the wing of the Aginic Ventures team, I've been developing a little something to help make life easier for geneticists. The idea started off as a fusion between Aginic's skill at getting insight from data and a geneticist's need to get insight from a whole lot of data (the human genome). Just over a year later and the product – Mychro – is my masters thesis topic, my day job, and the largest codebase I've had this much of a hand in building.

In building Mychro, I've experimented with GraphQL, Kubernetes, and even a brief foray into Rust. These days the GraphQL is still there (provided by postgraphile), but the backend is now provided by GCP managed App Engine and Cloud SQL. The frontend is all React, just like this site, only with a bit more technical debt and a bit less reliance on bleeding edge technology like Suspense. The frontend also messes with enough SVGs to make me give up hope on ever finding a browser that is able to follow the SVG spec.

But while I am the only developer committed to the project, I'm not building this alone. I'm lucky enough to have Jason working his magic in the product design department, and it's been a pleasure trying to use osmosis to learn just how he does it. In the management department, we have Alan Robertson running the show: our resident geneticist turned startup founder, as well as the Aginic Ventures team.

I've committed a lot of my time to this project since we kicked it off. I asked for it to be brought off the Aginic Ventures' back-burners and into the light of day so I could work on it for my thesis, and I've been giving the project all I have in technical skills since then. I've done this because while the risks are always high in the startup world, I believe the potential payoff for this is huge. If Mychro has the chance to help make the people out there fighting genetic diseases and cancers more efficient at the work they do, I can't not do my best to build it.

Anyway, check out the product and by all means get in touch with me or the rest of the team.