How to get experience as a bioinformatics software developer

Question

[d]

I come from a software development background, I would like to get into bioinformatics as a bioinformatics software developer.

I work a full-time job in a completely different sector, how can I get experience, hence create portfolio? Is there a open source projects to look at, or a competition database such as Kaggle...?

Is networking and personal coding the only way to get relevant experience and portfolio without working for a lab?

I am also studying genetics as a certificate and am experienced with data analysis.

Answer 1

[darklings]

there is an open source activity called Google Summer of Code, where there're some bioinformatics projects you can do: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2022/organizations Try keywords such as 'bio'

Answer 2

[BioInfoBeginner]

At the risk of seeming a bit flippant, if you want to get into bioinformatics software development and you're experienced with data analysis then just start. There are a million and one open source packages that you can try and can contribute to/improve on and there is nearly endless freely available data to play with if you want to develop pipelines. Perhaps try and get a feel for what kinds of biological questions bioinformaticians answer as bioinformatics is a term that describes a very broad field.