I have been enjoying Julia (the programming language) for roughly half a year now. I am no expert, but I have integrated it in many analysis steps of my research, resulting in a weekly usage.

Last week JuliaCon 2020 happened, a language-specific conference that due to the current pandemic, was held completely virtual. I did not really "attend" this conference, but caught a glimpse of it as I saw a few YouTube links of talks pass by. This triggered my curiosity and I quickly skimmed through the program to see if some of these talks matched my interest.

Here are the talks that I thought were interesting and might be worth a watch, given my background in bioinformatics and microbiology. They are all less than 10 minutes (Hurray for that format!):

General Julia usage

• Julia for scripting – Fredrik Ekre
  https://live.juliacon.org/talk/N39HSX

  A good wake-up call that my Julia usage is not ideal in around 50% of the cases. Nevertheless I think that beginners that handle Julia as scripting language can learn a lot about the basics of Julia in a very short time by replacing their current scripting language with Julia.

Handling tabular data in Julia

• The Queryverse – David Anthoff
  https://live.juliacon.org/talk/8EPG3L

  I am a big fan of R and its Tidyverse. When I moved over to Julia I searched for a Tidyverse equivalent and quickly stumbled on Queryverse.jl. Since I was learning a lot of new things at the same time, I was a little overwhelmed and have not been investigating the Queryverse since then. This talk convinced me I should pick this up again asap.

• The Julia Vega and Vega-Lite ecosystem – David Anthoff
  https://live.juliacon.org/talk/XBLMPG

  I have not made a single plot in Julia. Partly because I don’t believe there could be anything better than ggplot2 for plotting within data science pipelines, partly because my Julia skills were too rusty. Seeing the example plots created in Julia Vega and Vega-Lite have convinced me otherwise. Especially DataVoyager.jl, a dashboard to explore different visualisations of your data, sparked my interest. I am definitely going to invest some time in plotting within Julia using these packages.

Biology

• Computational tools for designing modular biosystems – Michiel Stock
  https://live.juliacon.org/talk/7MYVV3

  This talk does not include a lot of Julia code but instead skips through some very cool biological research that relies on Julia-implemented algorithms. I would like to have seen more of those! Is BioJuliaCon a thing?

• Analyzing species interaction networks in Julia – Francis Banville
  https://live.juliacon.org/talk/GPFUZR

  A brief overview of three Julia packages that are built around species interaction networks. Not sure if I would ever use one of these, but would be something to keep an eye on for many microbial ecologists.

Did I miss any interesting talk? Let me know!