A Founder’s Story: Julian Mazzitelli, CIO of BioBox Analytics (3/3)
By: Julian Mazzitelli
Tags: Software Development, Founder Stories, Startup, Kubernetes, DevOps

When I began my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, I knew exactly what I was going to study.

It started in a high school civics class, when our teacher handed out some university program fliers to help us figure out our career paths. One of these fliers was for a Bioinformatics program. I learned that a specialization in Bioinformatics combined two of my strongest passions — Biology & Computer Science. From that point on, I would go on to pursue those passions relentlessly throughout undergrad, and now at BioBox.

An exemplary instance of combining my passions is the real-scale 3D mitochondria I built for a project course. Outside of classes I kept these passions alive by participating in a Google Summer of Code project under the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, leading the iGEM dry lab team and joining the Center for Computational Medicine as a co-op student, where I would end up staying beyond my co-op term as summer research student on the CANDIG project. At CCM I worked on full stack web development, cloud computing infrastructure, and would participate in the bioinformatician team meetings. These skills in concert, unknowingly to me at the time, had prepared me for what would be the most exciting opportunity yet…

The powerhouse of the cell

One fateful evening, my co-founder Chris and I were having 🐟 sushi 🍣 at a favourite UofT spot on Baldwin. Chris had wrote a simple web application for biologists to configure plots to their data and was surprised at how well it was received. This first prototypal app exposed two pain points from both sides of the biology research fence:

Biologists want independence and autonomy when investigating data and Bioinformaticians want to spend more time on challenging problems rather than manually making modifications to plotting parameters.

Shortly thereafter, I was introduced to my second co-founder, Hamza, and the trio was formed.

I started BioBox with my two co-founders because we all have strong convictions to fix the problems that we ourselves had experienced. As a biologist (Chris), a bioinformatician (Hamza), and an infrastructure developer (Yours Truly), we each had a different perspective on the same problems. We bonded over our shared optimism that these problems could in fact be tackled, and imagined the possibilities of such a software.

Confidence in my co-founders is the ultimate reason I chose to join BioBox.

When not directly developing code for the product, I act as our DevOps ambassador by ensuring that our developers and team at large have a productive work environment. In the same way BioBox streamlines the research process between bioinformaticians and biologists, I am excited to apply DevOps methodologies and tools to our company’s internal assembly line to foster efficiencies. We have built the continuous integration and continuous deployment capabilities from the beginning with these goals in mind.

My personal mandate to utilize DevOps practices doesn’t stop at our company. Last fall I gave a conference talk on GitOps-based continuous delivery with Kubernetes as well as a meetup talk on leveraging GitOps for developer environments! I believe that a strong DevOps culture is key to a company’s success and am passionate about sharing it with the greater DevOps community.

GDG DevFest 2019 in Montreal

While DevOps has improved our internal processes, no amount of perfect sprint planning or developer tooling will scratch the itch my co-founders and I initially bonded over. The real meat and potatoes of BioBox is delivering a web application to enable the autonomy of biologists to explore their data while simultaneously streamlining the collaboration process for bioinformaticians.

I am beyond excited to continue to build this company alongside my colleagues, to influence our internal processes and culture, and to leverage my skills to help make our product the best it can possibly be.