UB Christmas Celebration & 1 Year Anniversary
We celebrated the Christmas holidays with the team on December 19th. Personally, I am also celebrating my 1-year anniversary working for the University of Barcelona as a software developer.
One year as a software developer at the University of Barcelona
On 19 December we celebrated Christmas with the BIOST3 team, the University of Barcelona's research group in Clinical Statistics, Data Science and Bioinformatics. For me it was a double celebration: it also marked my first year at UB, where I started as a software developer intern in December 2024 and continued as a full-stack developer.
What building research software looks like
Research software is different from a typical product. The users are scientists, the problems are open-ended, and requirements change as the research evolves. In one year I went from rebuilding a legacy desktop app for video analysis to building full-stack web platforms with Next.js, Python and PostgreSQL.
Along the way I worked on computer vision models such as SAM2 and CoTracker for video tracking, a RAG system that links data with scientific literature, and the migration of a video-processing pipeline to AWS with GPU instances.
Lessons from my first year
The biggest lesson was ownership: taking a project from an idea to something deployed, maintained and actually used. Automating deployments with Docker and CI/CD pipelines saved the team hours every week and made releases boring, in the best possible way.
The second was communication. Presenting our architectures and results to partners like VHIO, SequentiaBiotech and Harvard University taught me to explain technical decisions in terms that matter to the people who use them.
Looking ahead
A year in, what I value most is the team. Great research software comes from engineers and researchers working side by side, and that is what made this first year so rewarding.