Strengthening Australia’s Nextflow community through local and global collaboration
The Australian satellite site of the 2026 nf-core Hackathon has just taken place at the BioCommons node at Sydney Informatics Hub, the University of Sydney. The hands-on event brought together members of Australia’s Nextflow and nf-core community to contribute to nf-core projects, while strengthening connections locally and across the global community.
Twelve participants from University of NSW, University of Sydney, and University of Melbourne came together to collaborate in person on cutting-edge nf-core projects, with support from two Nextflow Ambassadors on BioCommons’ team, Dr Georgie Samaha and Dr Ziad Al Bkhetan.
As one of 29 global hackathon sites, the Australian team contributed to the international nf-core effort through asynchronous collaboration. Given our geography, the team was among the first to kick off the work, closing each day by connecting with the APAC teams working from sites in Aotearoa New Zealand and South Korea.
Attendees at the satellite site at the Sydney Informatics Hub, University of Sydney
The group made meaningful contributions to several nf-core projects, working to: close open issues and make a release for the nf-core ProteinFold pipeline; develop a new ConfigBuilder tool in the nf-core tools suite that helps users build Nextflow configuration files; and edit Nextflow for HPC training materials to support implementation by others with new documentation for trainers.
It was wonderful to see the progress made by the productive participants over three days together, and the outcomes reflect the depth of expertise and collaborative spirit of the Australian community. We are grateful to all participants for the energy and enthusiasm they brought. Thanks also to the Seqera team and the nf-core community for their support for the Australian satellite site of the hackathon, and especially for sponsoring our delicious lunch together on the final day!
Want to learn how to run and customise nf-core workflows? The Unlocking nf-core: customising workflows for your research workshop is taking applications now, and registrations are also open for our upcoming webinar Using Containers in Nextflow.
