A few years ago I heard that the smartest people are also the laziest people. That is because a lazy person looks for a better way not to waste efforts working on dumb (repetitive) tasks, and they often succeed in that! I think that deploying is currently one of the most annoying processes related to data science and bioinformatics. So, now you need to deploy better your code to be considered a good developer.
As a bioinformatician, you must be aware of the annoying times when you have to install very specific software in very different environments on very different computers. It scales quickly and you know there is so much code susceptible to carry a dependency mistake. Fortunately, this is not only a matter of bioinformaticians but for all types of developers.
So, people faced the same annoying dependencies errors all over the developer community. And some ideas like containers, started to brighten due to advances in engineering. Containers can encapsulate related things that do not require anything from outside to operate. Then some projects like docker and kubernetes started to become priorities.
Some python communities were also creating different ways to create containers. Eventually conda project emerges as a package manager that is also a environment manager. So now you can install, run and update software within an environment which is a container like space, and it does not conflict with any software outside itself. That is tremendously useful, the days when you need to use alternatives are gone.
Using conda is as simple as creating and activating an environment:
conda create --name my_env
conda activate my_env
And that is it! Now you have an environment isolated from the outside. You can break stuff inside and there is no problem to the outside because you just need to type:
conda deactivate
to return to the global configuration.
Obviously, you want to perform some install, update, etc. inside my_env. That is where the magic happens, but it is a topic for another post.