Hi! My name is Geraldine Van der Auwera; I’m one of the two authors of Genomics in the Cloud, an O’Reilly animal book about the science of genomics and how to apply it in practice using cloud computing infrastructure. On behalf of my coauthor Brian O’Connor and myself, I’d like to introduce this blog with a brief mission statement to set expectations about what you’re likely to find here.

In a nutshell, we envision this blog as a companion resource that will educate, inspire and possibly entertain you. We plan to cover topics like why you might want to read the book, how people are using what they learned from it in their work or studies, what has changed since the book came out, and, importantly, what we are revising to keep the content current as time passes and the tooling evolves. In addition to that, we’re also going to cover some materials and topics that we weren’t able to fit into the book itself because it was already over 400 pages long and our editor was adamant that it all had to fit in a single volume 🤷

Why start this now?

Truth be told, we had actually planned to start this blog when the book came out in April 2020, but life (and a pandemic) got in the way, so here we are, a year later.

But you know what, it works out. In that time, a lot of people have read the book and given us really useful feedback, so we have a decent picture of what people are looking for in the book and what they’re getting out of it. We’re pretty lucky that the tools we cover in the book have been fairly stable, so the content is still current. And we’re in close contact with the relevant development teams, so we’re able to plan revisions for some of the more substantial tool updates that are looming (spoiler: DRAGEN-GATK doesn’t change much in practice in terms of tool invocations in the hands-on exercises).

Stay tuned for updates

We’re aiming to put out new blog posts every couple of weeks. We don’t have anything set up yet for subscribing to the blog specifically, but it’s all contained within the Github repository where we store the book materials, so you can set the Github “watch repository” option to “All notifications” to get notified when anything changes. That does require signing up for a Github account if you don’t already have one, but rest assured it will come in handy later on, so this as good a time as any to cross that bridge.

You can learn more about the book itself (and potentially buy it, ahem) in the O’Reilly Learning Library, on Amazon (Kindle and paperback), and in both ebook and print formats from a variety of other booksellers. We do encourage you to get it through your local independent bookstore if you’re able.