Luiz Irber is a software engineer and researcher with 19 years of experience building reliable tools that let domain experts focus on their science. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UC Davis and blends systems programming in Rust and Python with bioinformatics algorithm design, notably contributing HyperLogLog cardinality estimation to the widely-used khmer k-mer toolkit. Luiz has productionized build and CI/CD pipelines for the bioconda ecosystem and served in engineering roles across genomics companies including 10x Genomics and Ancestry. He mentors scientists in sound computational practices and has a long-standing commitment to the Python community in Brazil. Entrepreneurial and hands-on, he runs Lasanha.org while now working at Earthmover from São Paulo. His background shows a rare mix of deep algorithmic work, infrastructure automation, and practical bioinformatics at scale.
19 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at University of California, Davis
Engineer Computer Engineering, Engineer Computer Engineering at UFSCar - Alumni
Técnico CTI, Técnico CTI at SETREM
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science at Michigan State University
In-memory nucleotide sequence k-mer counting, filtering, graph traversal and more
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Algorithm Engineer
Contributions:290 commits, 84 PRs, 254 pushes in 5 years
Contributions summary:Luiz primarily contributed to the implementation of a HyperLogLog (HLL) counter for cardinality estimation within the khmer library, a project focused on k-mer analysis. They implemented the C++ and Python boilerplate for the HLL counter and integrated various features like SHA-1 and MurmurHash3 hashing algorithms to the k-mer hash module. Their work also includes adding supporting methods like consume_string, consume_fasta and implementing bias estimation.
Contributions:23 reviews, 28 commits, 66 PRs in 4 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Luiz primarily contributed to the build and release processes for bioconda recipes. Their work included fixing build issues, adding and updating recipes, and integrating CI/CD pipelines. The user modified build scripts, updated dependencies, and adjusted configurations to ensure successful builds on different platforms. This included addressing compatibility problems and incorporating new software versions.
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