System Note 01 · Research Platforms

Bioinformatics Platform

Johns Hopkins University

ReactD3.jsR ShinyPythonDockerMicroservices
Private build
What it is

A web platform researchers use to explore, simulate, and analyze biological data without writing their own tooling from scratch. React and D3 on the front, R Shiny and Python services behind it, all containerized.

100+ researchers · microservices · Docker

Why I built it

Researchers were rebuilding the same analysis and plotting code over and over; a shared platform let them focus on the science.

What went wrong
  1. 01
    Slow enough to abandon
    Broke
    Pages that recomputed heavy analyses on every visit were slow enough that researchers stopped using them.
    Why
    Nothing was cached — each open re-ran the full computation, even when the inputs had not changed.
    Fix
    Added caching around the expensive steps so repeat views reuse results. Load time dropped about 83%.
Outcome
100+global researchers
83%load-time reduction

Evidence before confidence.

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