4 ms·
Those iPhone apps for cat picture sharing are valued at over a billion dollars by the marketplace, so it's kind of hard for developers to ignore. Truthfully, mo
by JunkDNA 13y ago
Those iPhone apps for cat picture sharing are valued at over a billion dollars by the marketplace, so it's kind of hard for developers to ignore. Truthfully, most of us in the field of biomedical informatics would have much more lucrative careers applying our scientific skills to figuring out how to get more people to click on advertisements.
It's unfortunate because as I see it, most scientific software is universally awful. It suffers from poor usability, poor maintainability, poor stability. Whole swaths of software are abandoned because they were someone's PhD thesis and that person has since moved on. Another commenter here is right: version control, bug tracking, testing, etc... are all luxuries that are seldom employed.
Shameless plug: If you're a hacker and interested in this stuff and want to help, we're always looking for contributors for our open source biomedical data discovery framework: http://harvest.research.chop.edu/ http://harvest.research.chop.edu/ We're trying hard to not do all the things I listed above.
- davecap1 13y agoHarvest looks very interesting! I'm a computational biologist in the field working on a startup called SolveBio (https://www.solvebio.com/ https://www.solvebio.com/). We're working on making the worlds biomedical data easily accessible to programmers and scientists. You might find it interesting and useful, especially to plug into Harvest.
- JunkDNA 13y agoSolveBio is exactly what I've been looking for for some other work I've been doing. We're using Harvest to build a variant filtering and reporting tool for clinical applications. We want to integrate external resources but we don't want to have to waste time writing parsers and keeping up with that public data stuff. Drop me a note (email is in my profile) if you want to talk more.
- yread 13y agoThat looks really cool. I'm working on tranSMART ( http://www.transmartfoundation.org/site/scientistsclinicians http://www.transmartfoundation.org/site/scientistsclinicians ) - a tool for connecting phenotypical and genetical data, perhaps it would make sense to integrate the two. Drop me a mail on j.hudecek at nki.nl. Oh and if you could find a spot for me in the private beta, that would be sweet.