Assaf "Gordy" Gordon has been developing software for over 25 years.
Before moving to Canada and starting House Gordon Software Company, Gordy worked as a bioinformatician in the US, at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and most recently at the New York Genome Center.
At the New York Genome Center he developed DNA.Land - A crowd-sourced genomic website. DNA.Land is built on top of Amazon Web Services, with more than 55,000 users, 75TB of S3 data, and thousand of monthly computing hours.
At the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research Gordy developed and operated a large-scale data analysis pipeline on AWS, analyzing 41TB of genomic data from the UK10K rare genetic variants database. The implementation focused on cost reduction using spot-instances, and totalled in 40,000 compute hours.
As a member of Prof Gregory Hannon's lab at
the
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL),
Gordy developed in-house analysis pipelines on the lab's SGE
grid infrastructure, coupled with a web-based PHP platform to
explore and visualize the results.
At CSHL Gordy also maintained the lab's internal
Galaxy server (a web-based bioinformatics platform),
and conducted weekly Unix tutorial workshop for lab members.
Many of these projects culminated in scientific publications. For a complete list, see here.
Gordy's passion is teaching, and he considers Seymour Papert's MindStorms to be the ultimate computer-teaching book, far ahead of many contemporary attempts. Gordy has taught at K12 schools, Montessori schools, colleges, bootcamp-style intense 3-month courses, interns and postdocs at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the New York Genome Center, and has been an instructor for 4 years at CSHL's Genome Access Course.
In his spare time Gordy is an amateur carpenter.