Can you provide more detail? That sounds interesting.

Sure I can mention my experience. It's a common path I see on https://www.reddit.com/r/bioinformatics/ or https://bioinformatics.stackexchange.com/. For me I moved to a new state (wife's job) and checked out Craigslist to look for interesting jobs. The local university Cancer Center had openings for experienced software engineers. No bio background but they had great bio people and I could help them analyze their data, take their R and Python code and clean it up, make it faster, add tests, scale to the cloud, etc. I kept a bio notebook on the side and attended talks and lectures, spent time with people on the bench, read books/textbooks etc, and gradually picked up a lot of the bio (it's a massively big domain—OOM bigger than I realized). It's a great combo when you have people with bio experience + people with software engineering experience. I was able to help lots of teams with various technical challenges, start my own projects, and met a lot of teams throughout the country + world doing interesting research and am still involved with various research endeavors.

A key challenge in biology now is the huge amount of data and wrangling that requires smart software, so someone with strong software engineering skills can be the difference between publishing a paper in 3 months vs 3 years. If you search any of the many top tier bio research orgs (Allen, MD Anderson, Broad) in the USA you'll see lots of openings for software engineers without too much consideration for prior bio experience.