Why am I Writing?

About this newsletter and what I'm interested in writing about

(KEYBOARD CLACKING)

There is little amusement to be had, however, in watching a man type.

Skip ahead, then, past the lonely, agonized months of composing, revising, polishing, editing, rewriting, cutting, pasting, pacing, doodling, and solitary drinking, and join our company as they take the stage for their first readthrough rehearsal.

- Asteroid City, 2023

A frustration I’ve had when reading a blog/newsletter that discusses a technical topic is that no one covers all of the topics I’m interested in or writes at a sufficient level of detail that satisfies me. I’ve become frustrated enough and decided to start writing my own technical blog. But I don’t care enough to hide the nitty gritty tech stack details - I don’t really believe the tech stack provides a competitive moat, so I’ll be including code snippets from my projects to showcase the lessons I’ve learned.

Erik Engheim’s blog is an excellent example of what I’m trying to accomplish by writing this newsletter. He writes about what he finds interesting at the moment. I want to do the same because it’s a good method for tracking what I’m learning and sharing it with the public. It’s my own way of using the Feynman method to determine if I truly understand

If you’re one of my friends or family, you’re most likely already aware of some of the things I’m working on.

My choice of topics will revolve mainly around TechBio and software development, subjects that I’ve focused on in my career so far. The short-and-sweet version of my bio is that I did my undergraduate studies in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins where I spent my time taking courses in cell and tissue engineering while also working as a lab assistant in a Neurology lab, as well as working with others on biomedical device development. I spent the past couple of years working as a software engineer and spending nights on my projects.

Here are some things that I’m interested in and working on in some capacity:

Adapt

A health platform for motivating people to consistently exercise and stay active. Think Duolingo, but for your health, and with an emphasis on game elements and multiplayer.

Right now, our team is building an iPhone app where you can join friendly competitions with others to see who can be the most consistent in working out. I’ll be sharing what we learned from our beta testing and our plans going forward.

Software for automated continuous directed evolution

Inspired by the Homebrew Bio club, I learned about bioreactors and directed evolution. I’d like to run some directed evolution experiments at home using my Pioreactor, an open-source bioreactor I just got my hands on.

I’m planning on building software to automate the experiments and workflows. Automation would help me quickly curate a dataset that I can use to train machine learning models to optimize the mutagenesis phase of directed evolution. Instead of random mutagenesis, how can I create a model to recommend the most promising gene sequences that satisfy my selection criteria?

And how can I use this software platform to help scientists and engineers apply bioengineering techniques for industrial applications? I’m looking to avoid clinical applications because of the long development cycles, FDA approvals, and the capital-intensive nature of running clinical trials.

Biotechnology

Areas I”m interested in include AlphaFold, synthetic biology, industrial biotechnology, the science and business of biotechnology.

Game Development

This is inspired by my appreciation for my favorite games, which includes Spiderman (Insomniac Games), Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar Games), Crusader Kings 3 (Paradox Interactive). The game development and business of AAA games is pretty cool and it seems like a great way to develop my C++ programming skills.

This list isn’t exhaustive, and I’ll most likely be broadening the topics I cover.

This newsletter gives me optionality with regard to where I want to take it. Maybe writing some angel checks to startups, learning about market opportunities in TechBio that I can target, sourcing candidates when I’m ready to recruit for my projects,

But the most important thing for me is meeting interesting people. My hope is that by building in public, I can meet like-minded people - and maybe I can inspire someone to take the leap on working on their own startup ideas.

Special thanks to Sravya Varanasi for proofreading drafts of this article.