3 ms·

> Sometimes a self-taught person comes along with a genuinely impressive project, and I push hard to hire those folks. But for the most part it's silly little s

> Sometimes a self-taught person comes along with a genuinely impressive project, and I push hard to hire those folks. But for the most part it's silly little single-person-project web apps and such. In your view, what distinguishes the former from the latter? CS is not my primarily skillset, but I do know "how to program". And, because I'm a grad student, I want to do something with a very high impressive:time ratio, if that makes sense.

throwawaygh 6y ago
> In your view, what distinguishes the former from the latter? Hard to give a generic answer. Basically, anything that makes me say "yeah there's no youtube tutorial for that, no public github repo you could copy ideas from, and you had to have solved a lot of difficult gritty problems in creative ways to get it to work". For that reason, A lot of the most impressive projects I've seen demonstrates the potential of a new tech stack. Demonstrations of promise can be either really cool demos or else pieces of infrastructure that lower the barrier to entry/iteration time/etc. Back when 3D printing and laser sintering where new technologies, here are examples of cool projects around that emerging stack: * digging into the firmware and/or hacking around the firmware to fix some limitation of the machine. This is probably not relevant anymore, but was when 3D printers were still new and had annoying bugs. * A domain-specific CAD-like tool that did a bunch of "physically possible" checks for certain types of objects by using numerical analysis to do a bunch of ad hoc checks. Fantastic project because you can look at it and say "if you took two years and did this in a more systematic way it'd be a great product" * auto-generated statues/art * etc. NB: that would be a bit less impressive these days, because 3D printing is now mainstream and a lot of these projects can be done via copy-pasta development from github repos, or even by following a youtube tutorial. What is your primary skillset, and what's an emerging capability in that space? How can you use software to either demonstrate the promise of that capability or else build useful infrastructure that could make that capability easier to access? NB: this is mostly for undergrad and maybe non-thesis masters projects. If you're in a thesis masters program or phd program, focus on doing science. Pick a good advisor and listen.
- biophysboy 6y ago
  Thanks for the ideas. I'm well into a physics phd program, specializing in biophysics. I want to work in biotech/pharma afterward, so I want to "prove my skill" with R/Python/C++. Trying to find a doable project that overlaps, that doesn't just seem like one of the genomics/bioinformatics practice problems.

throwawaygh 6y ago

> In your view, what distinguishes the former from the latter? Hard to give a generic answer. Basically, anything that makes me say "yeah there's no youtube tutorial for that, no public github repo you could copy ideas from, and you had to have solved a lot of difficult gritty problems in creative ways to get it to work". For that reason, A lot of the most impressive projects I've seen demonstrates the potential of a new tech stack. Demonstrations of promise can be either really cool demos or else pieces of infrastructure that lower the barrier to entry/iteration time/etc. Back when 3D printing and laser sintering where new technologies, here are examples of cool projects around that emerging stack: * digging into the firmware and/or hacking around the firmware to fix some limitation of the machine. This is probably not relevant anymore, but was when 3D printers were still new and had annoying bugs. * A domain-specific CAD-like tool that did a bunch of "physically possible" checks for certain types of objects by using numerical analysis to do a bunch of ad hoc checks. Fantastic project because you can look at it and say "if you took two years and did this in a more systematic way it'd be a great product" * auto-generated statues/art * etc. NB: that would be a bit less impressive these days, because 3D printing is now mainstream and a lot of these projects can be done via copy-pasta development from github repos, or even by following a youtube tutorial. What is your primary skillset, and what's an emerging capability in that space? How can you use software to either demonstrate the promise of that capability or else build useful infrastructure that could make that capability easier to access? NB: this is mostly for undergrad and maybe non-thesis masters projects. If you're in a thesis masters program or phd program, focus on doing science. Pick a good advisor and listen.

biophysboy 6y ago
Thanks for the ideas. I'm well into a physics phd program, specializing in biophysics. I want to work in biotech/pharma afterward, so I want to "prove my skill" with R/Python/C++. Trying to find a doable project that overlaps, that doesn't just seem like one of the genomics/bioinformatics practice problems.