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I work at a university and most of the time I am either doing research or teaching, but once in a while I get a call from a medical school or hospital asking if

I work at a university and most of the time I am either doing research or teaching, but once in a while I get a call from a medical school or hospital asking if I can volunteer programming time for a project. I wrote some very simple code about 15 years ago to generate some charts so that care teams at hospitals across the country can see how they are doing compared to teams at other centers. The charts had a very steep slope the first time that I ran them with a large gap between the best and worst centers. The top centers keep improving every year, but there has been a huge improvement at the other end of the graph and the slope is almost a flat line at this point. Obviously the care teams deserve 100% of the credit for the hard work to improve the medical care they are providing, but I can't help but smile every time I see one of those charts online or in a report.

reimertz 8y ago
It's inspiring to see how a fairly simple solution can have such an impact. That is why it's so exciting to work as a developer, but on the other hand, lack of real human interactions can also be really devastating after a while. Anyhow, really inspiring story and great job!
- bobochan 8y ago
  Absolutely true. What it really drives home for me though is how we are not following through with the promise of the personal computer revolution and empowering everyone to be able to write code. I remember trying to raise money years ago to try and put an Apple ][ in every classroom, and for years many school students learned bit of Logo, BASIC, and even Pascal. There was nothing complicated in what I did, but there seems to be such a backlog of worthy projects that just someone that can write some simple loops and conditional statements. There just has to be a way to empower more people to code.
  - Zak 8y ago
    Remember Hypercard? I remember Hypercard. It was a heavily graphical development tool and runtime with a very approachable scripting language. At one point, Apple included it with new Macs. At another point, they tried to charge money for it, which I think pretty much ruined it. Nothing I've seen since really filled the role it did. There were, of course significant limits, but it was universal (if you had a Mac at a certain point in time) and had an amazingly low barrier to entry.

reimertz 8y ago

It's inspiring to see how a fairly simple solution can have such an impact. That is why it's so exciting to work as a developer, but on the other hand, lack of real human interactions can also be really devastating after a while. Anyhow, really inspiring story and great job!

bobochan 8y ago
Absolutely true. What it really drives home for me though is how we are not following through with the promise of the personal computer revolution and empowering everyone to be able to write code. I remember trying to raise money years ago to try and put an Apple ][ in every classroom, and for years many school students learned bit of Logo, BASIC, and even Pascal. There was nothing complicated in what I did, but there seems to be such a backlog of worthy projects that just someone that can write some simple loops and conditional statements. There just has to be a way to empower more people to code.
- Zak 8y ago
  Remember Hypercard? I remember Hypercard. It was a heavily graphical development tool and runtime with a very approachable scripting language. At one point, Apple included it with new Macs. At another point, they tried to charge money for it, which I think pretty much ruined it. Nothing I've seen since really filled the role it did. There were, of course significant limits, but it was universal (if you had a Mac at a certain point in time) and had an amazingly low barrier to entry.