Mr Guus van de Steeg

Senior Software Developer

Alumni

This person is a member of Sanger Institute Alumni.

After 5 years at Sanger I have made the difficult decision to move back to the Netherlands to be closer to friends and family. I will be leaving Sanger after 1 May 2026.

I have spent 5 years as a software developer within the Pathogens and Microbes Informatics team. Together we have built many wonderful and hopefully useful applications, such as Monocle, Shelf, ENADownloader, and many others. I have also led the migration from our OpenStack VMs to a Kubernetes infrastructure, which has helped the team get automatic CI/CD in place for all our applications.

My team

As a subteam of PaM Informatics, my team develops and maintains software for our various science groups, provides general assistance regarding our infrastructure, and helps new starters get set up and running.

For example, we:

• develop and run bioinformatics pipelines written in Nextflow,
• develop new software that help scientists, like the ENADownloader, written in Python,
• maintain and troubleshoot legacy software, written in Perl.

My background

I am a biotechnologist turned bioinformatician turned software engineer. At an early stage in my career I have come to realise that while I have a fondness for biology, I didn’t have the interest to learn about the exact details of gene ABC-1/3 or protein WhatShallIcallItidase. I do however love to enable those who do have the patience and interest to learn about those. Therefore I have committed myself to develop software that helps scientists achieve their goals, be it new software that fills a gap or a simple parser that helps them sanitise their data inputs into a public database.

My timeline

• Started leading a new team

• Started working for Pathogen Informatics