Technical Writer for Streamlining MDAnalysis Docs and Resources

NumFOCUS Foundation

Thanks to the support of a Small Development Grant awarded to MDAnalysis by NumFOCUS, MDAnalysis is excited to start working with Namir Oues (@namiroues) as the Technical Writer for the funded project, “Unified and comprehensive documentation and learning resources for MDAnalysis”, with the goal to make it easier for new users to find the right resources to be productive with MDAnalysis.

MDAnalysis has an ever-expanding international community of users and developers. Part of our mission is to “educate our users to make best use of the tools that we produce, to enable them to become contributors to our community and code bases” and therefore we make thorough documentation and extensive learning resources – such as tutorials and online workshop materials – publicly available to users under open source licenses. However, a considerable amount of overlap between the many resources (e.g., website, user guide, docs, GitHub wiki) can make it somewhat difficult for self-learners to find the information they need.

Namir will consolidate the main website and additional MDAnalysis learning resources to guide users through a more streamlined workflow by removing duplication and outdated materials and more clearly delineating between developer-focused and user-focused content. A primary objective of this project is to enhance the user experience for newcomers to MDAnalysis and encourage continued growth in our user and developer communities.

Meet Namir Oues

Namir Oues

I am a Bioinformatics Researcher with a background in Mathematics and Computer Science. I recently submitted my PhD thesis in Computational Protein Design at Brunel University London, where I developed automated computational methods for redesigning protein dynamics using biomolecular simulations and machine learning techniques. The three tools I developed, MDSubSampler, MDAutoMut, and MDAutoPredict, were built on top of MDAnalysis.

Previously, I worked as a Research Software Developer at the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) of the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), where I developed scalable applications for healthcare data analysis and interfaced with multiple data sources to support medical research. I also have experience teaching High-Performance Computing (HPC), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning at the MSc level.

Outside of research and programming, I enjoy playing tennis and hiking, which help me balance work with an active lifestyle.

Follow Along with this Project

We encourage you to see how this work is progressing and to share your thoughts and feedback. There are many ways to get involved, including joining the developers and documentation channels on our Discord server (join using this invite link), engaging with the GitHub issue trackers for the main MDAnalysis repo and MDAnalysis User Guide repo, and interacting on the GitHub Discussions forum. Ultimately, the goal of this project is to meet the needs of our community, so please do chime in with your input!