Getting started with Galaxy
My journey with opensource began with Galaxy and it has been a fun ride. Hold on let me tell you what Galaxy is; Galaxy is an open, web-based platform for accessible, reproducible, and transparent computational research. There are 3 main public Galaxy servers (.org in the US, .eu in Europe, .org.au in Australia) or you can have your own instance where scientists can perform, reproduce, and share complete analyses, Yes! complete Analysis. How great is that?
How I got started.
I saw the Galaxy project and I said to myself ‘this will be interesting’. I joined a group with existing contributors and introduced myself. I chatted with some mentors and got guidance into the community and how to make contributions.
Before making contributions I needed to learn more about Galaxy. To build my knowledge, I went to Galaxy Training Network and then to Introduction where I took the Galaxy 101 for everyone tutorial. This Tutorial helps you to:
- Familiarize yourself with the basics of Galaxy.
- Learn how to obtain data from external sources.
- Learn how to run tools.
amongst other things to learn.
I completed the tutorial and built a workflow successfully which I published here. I built a workflow using a dataset I uploaded and I was able to use that same workflow on another dataset without having to repeat the process. Awesome!!
What next?
Next, I decided to make some changes I felt was relevant to the tutorial that will help beginners like me have a smooth process of learning/using Galaxy. I created a pull request on Github to describe the changes and why it is necessary.
I also found out about the Climate topic, I personally find that interesting. I hope to create more contributions to this topic. Speaking about topics, Galaxy has diverse topics and communities e.g Visualisation, Clinical workflows (including COVID-19), Cheminformatics, and many more. A detailed article on the diversity of Galaxy is coming!
Making a contribution has been easy thanks to the amazing mentors who are readily available and guide you all the way. Thanks Anne fouilloux, @Beatriz Serrano-Solano and other mentors.
#opensource #galaxy
