Physicists and engineers have been investigating the mechanical properties of materials for a long time. Biologists, aided by recent developments in microscopy, have gained fascinating insights into the fundamental role mechanical properties play during many biological processes. One of the barriers to entry for biologists interested in biomechanics is the mathematical and programming knowledge required to analyse viscoelastic experimental data. RHEOS, written in Julia, is an open source project aiming to address that issue whilst also providing a more general rheological analysis toolkit for anyone who wants to analyse their viscoelastic material data, biological or otherwise. The software was originally written in Python. It was slow, but just about acceptable for a patient PhD student who had other things to keep busy with whilst the data was processing. Once the decision was made to extend it and publish it as open source software, it was clear that either more of the computationally intense parts would have to be outsourced from Python, or that it should be rewritten in a new language entirely. We chose the latter and the software has now been rewritten in Julia, with a first public release scheduled for March 2018. In this talk I will discuss the software’s capabilities, examples of rheology informing biology, more detail on the motivations for choosing Julia, the features of Julia which has helped the project come together, and any obstacles I ran into along the way and how they were overcome.
