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However, we do need to account for concurrent users of the same tool, and be prepared to scale up as traffic increases.

We don’t expect high traffic for these tools - at the moment each is used a few dozen times a week at most.

The tools’ specialized use cases mean their codebases are largely independent save for some common helper functions.

We want to optimize for a process that supports rapid development and deployment of small, narrowly-scoped tools.

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(Not surprisingly, the Solutions Engineering team has quite a few fans among the rest of the company.) Criteria for Solutions Engineering Developmentīecause the Solutions Engineering team’s goals differ from those of a standard software team, various aspects of our development process differ as well:

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Can you make a tool to automate this?” This may only affect a handful of users performing one specific kind of analysis, but having a Solutions Engineer write a couple hundred lines of code can save these users hours per week. When I have to do this for twenty files at once it becomes extremely time-consuming and increasingly error-prone. csv of measurement readings, which I have to reformat manually and upload to the next step in my analysis workflow. Put another way, Solutions Engineering is the duct tape team for software at Zymergen - we provide quick fixes to immediate problems.Ī typical request from a scientist to Solutions might be something like: “A machine I use outputs a. The success of a Solutions tool is measured largely by turnaround time and effort saved for the user, with less emphasis on long-term robustness or flexible use cases. We do this by providing small-scale tools - often narrowly scoped to enable or automate a few use cases. While other Software teams work on building out our core platform, the Solutions team works to unblock or speed up scientists’ workflows that fall at the edges of that domain. Because of this rapidly changing and growing domain of work, our existing software and data tracking may not always support what users are doing. Our users work in a wide range of scientific disciplines (strain design, modeling, chemical analysis, and lab work, to name a few) and are often developing new processes, researching new opportunities, and trying new technologies. The mandate of the Solutions Engineering team is to support our internal users (Zymergen scientists) by providing last-mile support, rapid prototyping, and one-off software solutions. Scientists at Zymergen and the Solutions Engineering Team In this article, I’ll be talking about what makes Solutions Engineering so singular, what that means for our development practices, and how we address that with our software framework. Our unique requirements call for us to architect a custom platform to best provide tools for our users.

While the Solutions Engineering team at Zymergen works on software, we do so in a fundamentally different way than the Software department. How Solutions Engineering Goals Drive Our Architecture Design

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