We’re proud and lucky to have a thriving community of enthusiastic Plotly users. Plotly Community Manager Adam Schroeder started a new initiative called “Plotly Hangouts”. The casual session will occur every month and feature an interactive interview with a Plotly Community member with live audience Q&A. (Think of it as a virtual fireside chat!)

The October session featured Thomas Weber, a Research Fellow at the Data Science Center of European Molecular Biology Laboratory, where he’s part of the ARISE program. He leads the development of Depictio, a platform that enables researchers to create and share interactive dashboards and web applications directly from bioinformatics pipeline outputs using Dash. During the Hangout, Thomas covered the following:

• Turning complex bioinformatics pipeline outputs into interactive Dash apps that make results easy to explore and share.
• The importance of keeping part of the system close to the data, with a dedicated Python companion package that connects analyses and dashboards seamlessly.
• Scaling Depictio from individual projects to institutional use with a Kubernetes-ready setup (Dash, FastAPI, MongoDB, Redis, and S3) built for reliable, production-grade deployment.