The story of a small ProteomeXchange metadata tool that started as a fragile Selenium parser and became a PyPI package the lab can actually depend on.

Why vendor mass spectrometry formats bother me, why a small native bridge might matter, and why Zig feels like the right place to test the idea.

Thermo locks its format behind Windows DLLs. Bruker does better. Spectronaut adds its own proprietary layer on top. Open formats are inevitable, but the real bottleneck is proprietary converters in the middle.