Developers’ Forum

Attention

The Developer’s Forum is starting up again! It is currently planned for the last Thursday of every month at 4pm GMT, with the first iteration taking place February 26th 4pm GMT.

If you have a topic, concern, or project you would like to present or solicit feedback on, please contact Nicholas Cooley (NPC) at Nicholas(dot)Cooley(at)ul(dot)ie.

Overview

The Bioconductor project is a rich and complex ecosystem of software tools intended for an increasingly diverse array of computational biology and medical informatics research questions. This growth of project scope is deeply intertwined with the complexities of computer science that serve as infrastructure for modern data science. The Developers’ Forum aims to provide a regular platform for developers and users to describe existing software and hardware infrastructure, present plans for future developments, and discuss changes that may impact developers within the Bioconductor project.

The goals of the Forum include, but are not limited to:

Ensuring the retention and accessibility of institutional knowledge.
Informing the community of ongoing or imminent work to key packages.
Sharing insights into and paradigms for sustainable software development practices within Bioconductor.
Ensure that impending changes in upstream software infrastructure (i.e. r-devel changes) are understood and publicized to the community when necessary.
Ensure a community minded perspective on the maintenance and expansion of the Bioconductor core codebase.
Provide developers a seat at the table for discussions on changes to Bioconductor and/or the scientific and compute infrastucture that surrounds the project.

The structure of the Forum is currently set to include two short presentations (10-ish minutes preferred, shorter or longer is fine within reason), and provided time for long discussions about the topics of those presentations. Discussions are to remain collegial and welcoming to all participants.

Audience

The Forum will often be deeply technical in some form or another, but attendance is open to any Bioconductor user or developer, especially junior career academics and developers, regardless of training background or skill levels.

Schedule

The Forum takes place on the last Thursday of each month. The current time slot is planned for 8am PST, 4pm GMT, 6pm CEST, and meetings will last approximately one hour. We will announce upcoming meetings on the Bioconductor developer mailing list, Zulip, and Bioconductor socials. Bioconductor is a global project with developers and users across many time zones, so Forum times may be subject to change, but calendar invites, announcements, and social media material will be explicit for the upcoming time slot.

Upcoming Meetings

Thursday February 26th 2026 8am PST, 4pm GMT, 6pm CEST
- Presentation 1: Native GPU compute access in R; Metal, openCL, CUDA, and heterogeneous compute hardware frameworks, Nicholas Cooley
- Presentation 2: TBA - please contact NPC if you wish to present
Thursday March 26th 2026 8am PST, 4pm GMT, 6pm CEST
- Presentation 1: TBA - please contact NPC if you wish to present
- Presentation 2: TBA - please contact NPC if you wish to present
Thursady April 30th 2026 8am PST, 4pm GMT, 6pm CEST
- Presentation 1: TBA - please contact NPC if you wish to present
- Presentation 2: TBA - please contact NPC if you wish to present

Previous Meetings

Recordings of previous meetings can be found on the Bioconductor YouTube channel as well as on the Course Materials page.