DevTO is a popular meetup for software developers in Toronto. Attended by over 100 developers on the last Monday of each month, the group features two 20-minute presentations on various topics from the industry, accompanied by food, drinks and networking.

On April 30, Wealthsimple hosted the event celebrating the 7th anniversary of DevTO. I was invited to give a talk on building a global search engine for genetic data.

In the session focused on the Beacon Network, we talked about the importance of the system, the problem it solves, the history of the Beacon standard, architecture and technologies behind the system, as well as some basic usage statistics of this open-source project. Aside from the WiFi issues affecting the live demo, the talk went well and received a lot of good feedback. I was very positively surprised by the number and quality of questions asked by the audience after the talk, as well as people’s general interest in genetics and genetic data sharing.

The presentation was recorded:

The slides are available online (download here):

Building a Global Search Engine for Genetic Data from Miro Cupak

Big thanks to DevTO for inviting me, Wealthsimple for hosting, and attendees for their interest and feedback!