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I am a chronically ill patient and currently reading 10% human by Alanna Collen. Over the past years, I have become more and more interested in the human microbiome. I am a skilled programmer, but don't have any education in biology. Rather I am a cyber security specialist.

However I'd really like to aid research in this specific area.

  • are there any ways I can contribute to or aid the research of the human microbiome using my computer skills?

  • do you know of a better place to ask this question?

Thank you! (Book is highly recommended)

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There's a lot of open source software in bioinformatics that has been written by scientists rather than software engineers. And whilst they do this with the best of intentions, there is often some room for improvement in terms of code design, documentation, testing etc. There are almost certainly many researchers who would love to have a software engineer help improve their code base through submitting pull requests on their GitHub. I would advise searching around, finding a repository that looks interesting to you, learn how it is structured, and then perhaps contact the maintainer to see if there are any things that need improving, updating etc.

It may not be the most glamorous thing in the world, but software is a huge bottleneck for researchers, and if you can make them more efficient/easier to use, you will be helping research in your own way.

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