The democratization of bioinformatics: A software engineering perspective

Today, thanks to advances in cloud computing, it is possible for small teams of software developers to produce internet-scale products, a feat that was previously the preserve of large organizations. Herein, we describe how these advances in software engineering can be made more readily available to bioinformaticians. In the same way that cloud computing has democratized access to distributed systems engineering for generalist software engineers, access to scalable and reproducible bioinformatic engineering can be democratized for generalist bioinformaticians and biologists. We present solutions, based on our own efforts, to achieve this goal.