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I worked nearly full-time for about 2 years using my personal savings on a project management software for labs ("Labengine"). The big hook was that it let you

I worked nearly full-time for about 2 years using my personal savings on a project management software for labs ("Labengine"). The big hook was that it let you run common bioinformatics apps on your data and it would automatically convert the input file to the expected format (there were lots of competing bioinformatics file formats at the time). I had a few of my old professors use it and "love" it but nobody ended up paying. It was a good lesson for me to not work on a project in isolation too long; release early release often is the motto now. Edit: I stopped working on it after it bombed horrifically but kept burning through my savings and after a few other ideas ended up with a successful company (Shodan). I still learned a lot from failing with Labengine but I don't think working on it another few years would've made it successful.

xnyan 5y ago
You could have made the best software in the world, but as someone who now works as an in-house developer for a medical research university, there's almost no way for individual researchers to have significant influence on IT budgets. Sure, there are always a few rock stars who pull in huge grants and thus have some control over institutional spend, but in general the operations side of academia has little influence on what software is bought/used. Because of this, I've found there's quite a bit of (understandable) apathy among researchers with regards to anything related to IT - you have no control over it, it's a miserable necessity for your real job.
clusterhacks 5y ago
I work in the medical research space and we have LIMS (lab info management systems for people outside this niche) and am consistently amazed by the number of companies trying to get into our IT systems with lab management packages. It's a very tough space to break into it and my recent experience is that the big EMS/EMR vendors are increasingly trying to offer "modules" to do LIMS and bioinformatics analysis pipelines. Every now and again I start thinking about unsupervised learning projects in this space but look around and see just how little spend on analytics software there is for bioinformatics tools and settle down to focus on helping folks with our cluster and general reporting needs . . .

xnyan 5y ago

You could have made the best software in the world, but as someone who now works as an in-house developer for a medical research university, there's almost no way for individual researchers to have significant influence on IT budgets. Sure, there are always a few rock stars who pull in huge grants and thus have some control over institutional spend, but in general the operations side of academia has little influence on what software is bought/used. Because of this, I've found there's quite a bit of (understandable) apathy among researchers with regards to anything related to IT - you have no control over it, it's a miserable necessity for your real job.

clusterhacks 5y ago

I work in the medical research space and we have LIMS (lab info management systems for people outside this niche) and am consistently amazed by the number of companies trying to get into our IT systems with lab management packages. It's a very tough space to break into it and my recent experience is that the big EMS/EMR vendors are increasingly trying to offer "modules" to do LIMS and bioinformatics analysis pipelines. Every now and again I start thinking about unsupervised learning projects in this space but look around and see just how little spend on analytics software there is for bioinformatics tools and settle down to focus on helping folks with our cluster and general reporting needs . . .