In the grand spirit of biohacking and the DIYBio community, we take a very engineering-forward approach. Our particular style of engineering-forward approach is known as Zaravash'ta. This leads to us publishing our intentions regarding what we are working on and developing before there is scientific research that backs the full understanding of all the processes involved. Some folks get scared or annoyed by that and spread negative commentaries about it. We hope that before you read our publications, you will first understand that these are not intended to be peer reviewed scientific papers. Treat them more as statements of intent, explorations of what might be possible and attempts to lay out the roadmap for where we are heading with our work. If we can't do it one way, we'll try another. These publications are not set in stone. They are not intended to be cited as the foundational basis for all that is to come. That's what the finished, working code is for. And even that is subject to a good old fashioned complete rewrite if needed.
https://laberation.pubpub.org is where we put our most refined publications so far.
We also have a bunch of work in progress documents per-module in the module repositories of our Gitlab server at
https://gitlab.vulpinedesigns.com/exploreAnd we follow a general process of:
- Gather and read research links
- Organise by module relevance
- Paste into 'skeledraft' documents with basic headers and section titles
- Flesh out the documents with info about each submodule and how it's all going to fit together for that module, in a draft version.
- Format the references and citations properly and fill out more nuanced details. Make sure it all makes sense.
- Publish to our PubPub.
Back in 2016, we also got published in Biocoder Magazine.
https://www.oreilly.com/content/are-your-ribosomes-in-a-twist/
As you can see, the old article in Biocoder is significantly different to what INITIATOR SET became by the time we wrote the article on our PubPub page, and what it subsequently became as we continued to code it. This is to be expected as we figure more out of what works and what doesn't, and get more of it actually built.
So please remember, even if our current versions of our documents don't look like they dot all the i's and cross all the t's, and leave wide open too many questions for your taste, that doesn't mean it's impossible to improve on. Nothing is impossible.
