Grokking Synthetic Biology | Dmitriy Ryaboy (Twitter, Ginkgo Bioworks)

Software Misadventures

From building a data platform and Parquet at Twitter to using AI to make biology easier to engineer at Ginkgo Bioworks, Dmitriy joins the show to chat about the early days of big data, the conversation that made him jump into SynBio, LLMs for proteins and more.

Segments: (00:03:18) Data engineering roots (00:05:40) Early influences at Lawrence Berkeley Lab (00:09:46) Value of a "gentleman's education in computer science" (00:14:34) The end of junior software engineers (00:20:10) Deciding to go back to school (00:21:36) Early experiments with distributed systems (00:23:33) The early days of big data (00:29:16) "The thing we used to call big data is now ai" (00:31:02) The maturation of data engineering (00:35:05) From consumer tech to biotech (00:37:42) "The 21st century is the century of biology" (00:40:54) The science of lab automation (00:47:22) Software development in biotech vs. consumer tech (00:50:34) Swes make more $$ than scientists? (00:54:27) Llms for language is boring. Llms for proteins? that's cool (01:02:52) Protein engineering 101 (01:06:01) Model explainability in biology

Show Notes:

• The Death of the Junior Developer: https://sourcegraph.com/blog/the-death-of-the-junior-developer
• Dmitriy on twitter: https://x.com/squarecog?lang=en
• Tech and Bio slack community: https://www.bitsinbio.org/

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Music: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en