Before starting to add new features or work on new projects, it's always good to take stock and to think about refactoring (improving the codebase) and looking at what foundations need to be built.

This week has been all about foundational work. Some of time has been spent refactoring and restructuring the template code so that it can be shared between microservices. This has been accompanied by starting to build some tools which will allow local development environments and production environments to pull in up to date templates and data as part of the build and deploy process.

Another part of the work, equally foundational, was to start developing shared constants for the different pipelines and the website. This will reduce the risk of wrong or outdated constants being used. These will all be hosted in an open GitHub repository.

The final piece of foundational work has been looking at the IMGT paper on consistent numbering and beginning to develop a data structure to hold that information and information on the role of individual positions within the moledules (i.e TAPBPR binding, TCR binding, peptide binding).

It's not all been software development this week. I've also been joining in on an Open Targets project, talking through user needs with one of the PDB in Europe teams and attending a couple of fascinating seminars. It's lovely to be part of an organisation where I get to see and participate in such interesting scientific discussions.