Hiring senior software engineers with experience in Agile and Lean has always been difficult. Training university graduates or engineers from other backgrounds takes time and can cause disruption to software teams. 7digital addressed both of these problems by starting a Technical Academy; a 6 month programme of classroom sessions, pairing, deliberate practice, personal project work and guided learning. Backed by key metrics and qualitative data, the paper explores the positive impact that the technical academy has had on the technology team and wider organisation at 7digital. It investigates the changes in technique, curriculum and structure that the team made over the three iterations of the academy. It goes on to detail the challenges that the team faced around justifying the time away from usual activities, measuring the impact, attempting to predict the long term benefit and make the result of extra diversity in the team more apparent.

UNLABELLED: VariantAnnotation is an R / Bioconductor package for the exploration and annotation of genetic variants. Capabilities exist for reading, writing and filtering variant call format (VCF) files. VariantAnnotation allows ready access to additional R / Bioconductor facilities for advanced statistical analysis, data transformation, visualization and integration with diverse genomic resources. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: This package is implemented in R and available for download at the Bioconductor Web site (http://bioconductor.org/packages/2.13/bioc/html/VariantAnnotation.html). The package contains extensive help pages for individual functions and a 'vignette' outlining typical work flows; it is made available under the open source 'Artistic-2.0' license. Version 1.9.38 was used in this article.

GeneClinics is an online genetic information resource consisting of descriptions of specific inherited disorders ("disease profiles") as well as information on the role of genetic testing in the diagnosis, management, and genetic counseling of patients with these inherited conditions. GeneClinics is intended to promote the use of genetic services in medical care and personal decision making by providing health care practitioners and patients with information on genetic testing for specific inherited disorders. GeneClinics is implemented as an object-oriented database containing a combination of data and semistructured text that is rendered as HTML for publishing a given "disease profile" on the Web. Content is acquired from authors via templates, converted to an XML document reflecting the underlying database schema (with tagging of embedded data), and then loaded into the database and subjected to peer review. The initial implementation of a production system and the first phase of population of the GeneClinics database content are complete. Further expansion of the content to cover more disease, significant scaling up of rate of content creation, and evaluation redesign are under way. The ultimate goal is to have an entry in GeneClinics for each entry in the GeneTests directory of medical genetics laboratories-that is, for each disease for which clinical genetic testing is available.