Using WebAssembly and Cloudflare Workers to power genomics analysis — It sometimes feels like WebAssembly was made for genomics: A lot of bioinformatics tools are written in C/C++/Rust, and it is increasingly common for web apps to perform more of the analysis in the browser. While it makes sense to run WebAssembly in the browser to analyze local data, what…

How SIMD makes compute-intensive tools practical on the web — If you’re new to WebAssembly, check out this article first. WebAssembly can be a powerful way to speed up web apps, and it’s about to get a whole lot better thanks to the upcoming WebAssembly SIMD feature. SIMD is a technique to speed up calculations (more on that later), but…

Why the current definition could hurt WebAssembly adoption — I still remember my first encounter with WebAssembly a few years ago. Some called it a low-level bytecode for the web, others a sandboxed environment for execution, and others yet an instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. At the time, I had mostly done web development so I was…

A tutorial on using WebAssembly with Emscripten and C/C++ (even if you don’t know any C/C++) — JavaScript — which was famously designed in 10 days way back in 1995 — has until very recently remained the only language you could use natively on the web. It wasn’t until 2017 that WebAssembly 1.0 was released, making it the second language supported by all major web browsers. What is WebAssembly? As…

How to port an Asteroids game from C to WebAssembly 🎮 — WebAssembly is a new language for the web. Much like low-level assembly languages, however, very few people write WebAssembly by hand; instead, you can compile code written in other languages (e.g. C, C++ and Rust) to WebAssembly and run that code in the browser. Why would you ever want to…

A behind-the-scenes look at how I self-published “Level up with WebAssembly” as a side-project in 4 months. — Earlier this month, I published the book Level up with WebAssembly 🎉. It aims to be a practical guide to using WebAssembly, a new programming language that helps you port existing C/C++/Rust code to the web (click here to learn more). …

A Benchmark of VM Boot Times on the Google Cloud — For an overview of Google Cloud vs. AWS in terms of pricing and features, see my previous article, A Tale of Two Clouds. A good rule of thumb on The Cloud™ is that VMs typically boot in 1 to 2 minutes. In this article, we’ll test this hypothesis on the…

We all know arrays are useful, but how are they useful on the command line? — Although software engineers regularly use the command line for many aspects of development, arrays are likely one of the more obscure features of the command line (although not as obscure as the regex operator =~). But obscurity and questionable syntax aside, Bash arrays can be very powerful. Wait, but why? Writing about Bash…

Although Excel can be a powerful tool for biologists, it also converts some gene names into dates. Here‘s an app to solve that issue. — UPDATE (June 2020): There’s now a web app version of Oct4th available at https://oct4th.sandbox.bio, and a command-line tool for larger datasets. Microsoft Excel is likely one of the most widely used data analysis tools in the field of biology. And with reason. …