Welcome to GinkgoBits!

Ginkgo Bioworks is well known in the biotech world for our mission: to make biology easier to engineer. It powers our work and collaborations for sustainable agriculture, meat alternatives, living medicines, and most recently, playing an active role in the world’s fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. What is not well known is that digital technologies (software, data, IT, InfoSec and DevOps), as well as our product management and UX teams, are central to Ginkgo’s mission and success. These functions form our Digital Tech team.

Like other digital technology teams, we use modern first-class tools and technologies such as React, GraphQL, AWS, Snowflake, Jupyter, and Docker. We use these technologies to process terabytes of data every day in an environment where each year we process 3 times more data than the year before. We adhere to the tenets of Agile development, meeting regularly with users, delivering value early and often, and reflecting on how we can improve while having more fun.

So what makes Ginkgo Digital Tech unique? Well, for one, our team is building Ginkgo’s software platform that will benefit humanity by tackling its most vexing problems, including the current COVID-19 pandemic. Second, we built the platform to scale to levels previously unimagined in biology research and is processing and analyzing tens of thousands of biological samples daily and even more tomorrow. In the process of doing so, Digital Tech members work directly with scientists to solve the most advanced problems of the day. This also means that we have opportunities to play and interface with advanced scientific instruments including robots, mass spectrometers, next-generation sequencers and automated fermentors. Most importantly, we care deeply about our fun and nurturing environment and we actively work towards this through initiatives like our Digital Tech GrowING.

We are proud of our team and our work so we will be talking more about it in the coming weeks via GinkgoBits, which encompasses Twitter and our blog. There are a number of things we want to talk about ranging from algorithms, AWS, product management to, yes, COVID-19. What would you like to hear about? Let us know. And welcome to GinkgoBits!

Posted by Jamie Cho