Hello World! This blog will be tracking the development of bio-maf, a Multiple Alignment Format (MAF) parser for the Ruby bioinformatics library BioRuby, as part of the Google Summer of Code 2012. I’m Clayton Wheeler, a programmer and a biology student at the University of Michigan. This is exciting for me as my first substantial open source project, and as a way to write hopefully-useful bioinformatics software. And thanks, Google, for making this possible.

In my next post I’ll discuss what MAF is, what it’s useful for, and how I’m planning to approach the project. I’ll be making weekly status posts, plus others as inspiration strikes.