Hi all, I'm a research software engineer at the University of Southampton in the UK. I'm the architect and core developer on a project that aims to enable interoperability of disparate software applications and combining them into coherent computational pipelines with consistent data management. It's a microservice architecture that involves a bunch of docker images that depend on each other (plus additional build steps for artifacts to be copied into these images). So far I've been using pydoit with some custom glue code to manage the build process, but it's getting increasingly cumbersome. I'm excited to explore if I can use pants for this task instead and hopefully improve the build speed and reduce the maintenance burden. I'm also curious if pants can help in the context of data analysis for other projects I've worked on. For example, manage the execution of scripts that preprocess raw data, produce various kinds of derived data and generate visualisations.