LIMS - Laboratory Information Management Systems.

Definitely Niche. I've been doing it for about 15 years and I keep seeing the same consultants over and over again.

Here's the deal. Most manufacturing companies (think Big Pharma, Petrochemical, Chemical, Widget manufacturing, anything really) measure quality. Those quality measurements are probably done in a laboratory. Every laboratory generates data. All that data needs to be managed well so that the laboratory can maintain its accredidation.

Basically, LIMS systems manage samples and lab result data. In addition, they probably integrate with Instruments and instrument software to automate some of that data entry.

Other industries besides manufacturing are Govt (waste and wastewater treatment labs), Third-party labs (labs that do testing for other companies), Healthcare (clinical labs), Forensic Labs, and more.

Bottom line, there are tons of laboratories and they all need to manage their data.

The players in this space are downright stuck in the last decade. There is so much opportunity here for a few new players to come in and make a step-change.

I'm currently working on creating a modern LIMS to manage Laboratory data.

That's awesome. Would love to know more. I was (only tangentially, really it was my manager) involved with (one of many) LIMS evaluations at CSIRO. I'm under the impression that "Generic" LIMS have awful track records in Australia at universities and research orgs like CSIRO: despite custom software projects also having poor cost/performance outcomes generally, historically it seems there aren't any great examples of LIMS aimed at diverse multidisciplinary research environments which have delivered better outcomes at less cost than even the most horribly expensive over-budget bespoke systems places like this churn out. There is a trail of train wrecks that is failed LIMS projects in this sector, largely from manufacturing/forensics sector thinking their LIMS fits all...

The most inspiring thing I saw was work on automated high-throughput materials discovery (I believe the examples at the time were polymers). Instrument operation, experiment design and results capture was done with OWL/RDF... And off it goes: repeatable results where the software drives experiment parameters until a goal or properties are reached. Semantic web tech has a lot of failed promises to answer for but those guys really seemed to make this stuff sing. Seeing what they're modeling/capturing, graph data models might not be such a bad fit, after seeing the contortions we went through in genetic studies trying to capture every facet of every piece of data and its provenance and the provenance of its methods and materials and specimens and specimen preparation and specimen identification and splitting and cloning and so on ad nauseum

Better stop ranting. I do software defined radio at dayjob and some silly osint graph-db driven thing I'm playing with at home to help security audit all packages, binaries and hopefully one day in-memory processes in linux/containers :)

You are totally on point about the one-size-fits LIMS for QC Labs not working in the research lab. It's my observation that research labs need a solution that is much more dynamic than the traditional LIMS.

I like your comments regarding OWL/RDF. I will have to look into that. I know of a few Chemical / Polymer mfg. companies who are still using their homegrown LIMS-slash-PLM systems to manage new materials research.

The thing I love about this field the most is working along side very intelligent chemists and engineers and helping them automate their labs. The appreciation factor is through the roof when you can remove manual data entry and help them advance their laboratory throughput.

A truly informative post. Thanks for telling us something about your niche.

A medical device startup, based on a technology platform I invented in grad school. The startup part is what started me hanging out on HN, but I've found that there is very little overlap between what I'm trying to do and what startups on HN do. Still, things are interesting enough here that I keep checking in.

edit: I missed the "how's it working out?" part.

Not great. Cash starved from day 1. Funding for medical devices is quite, quite different than software (i.e., bad but getting better recently). We don't fit the model for many VCs, so that limits potential sources, and being in medical devices means that we need to deal with sophisticated investors that can run proper DD on us, further limiting potential sources. Funding has been (and still is) a struggle! It's also a little bit "lonely": we run into a lot of problems unique to this industry, but often we can't talk about it in detail, and even when we can, there aren't many people around to talk to.

Project management has been interesting. There's quite a number of consulting and industrial design groups out there, which helps to bring in expertise when needed and keep things lean overall. A big challenge has been in setting up the supply chain: it's not something I've done (or thought of) before, but consulting has helped out here as well. Basically, we'd be dead in the water without outside consultants.

Regulatory affairs is a pain, but I appreciate why it's there and it's not onerous per se, just slows everything down (not necessarily a bad thing). It more or less distills down to documenting "say what you're doing, and do what you're saying".

The technology side is a bit boring, honestly. We need to design things conservatively, unless we have a really, really good reason not to. We also need guaranteed years of availability for parts, which additionally tends to lead to conservative designs.

Surprising lessons learned: cable management (i.e., in the device) is a nightmare, and packaging is anything but a simple problem to solve. Also, may have learned more in 6 mos. tilting at these windmills than my entire undergrad + graduate career.

What kind of consultants do you typically find yourself needing?

I've been in the Medical Device field as a software engineer for almost 20 years and I'm beginning to look for other ways to leverage that experience. Most of my background in the field is in software/firmware development but I've managed to learn bits and pieces of Supply Chain, Regulatory, Manufacturing, Field Service and related subjects to get my job done.

Cable management: yeah. Our previous instrument had over a mile of wire & cable in its first iteration.

Inexpensive ones.

Kidding aside, as a startup, our needs and capabilities are quite different from a more established company. We can't afford to pay for consultants to fly business class, nor expensive per diems. We can't afford to implement heavyweight development processes, nor should we since being nimble is one of the few advantages we have as a startup. Software licensing costs is a concern at this stage, so we'd rather do a subscription for a (for example) CAD package even if it's not the industry standard over buying a license for the industry standard package. Also frustrating in general is that as a medical device, our volumes are never "large" in the consumer sense and so many common manufacturing processes (e.g., injection molding) are not practical, nor are companies excited to supply parts in our expected volumes—our consultants need to consider what are sometimes less common processes or smaller, "hungrier" suppliers. For many things, the budget is driving the bus, and it's within reason acceptable to need to spend more in the future if it means we can spend less now.

It can be hard to find the a consultant at an experienced group (and domain expertise is what we need) that is willing to work with us. Our future business is not guaranteed (statistically we are likely to fail), the business we will be bringing is small, and we're pinching pennies on what we bring. What seems to have worked is to find a "hungry" associate-level consultant (keeps costs lower) at a larger group who can tap into the experience of senior/principal-level consultants on demand. We point out that, if successful, we'll be able to bring more business to the associate-level consultants, so we both will grow together.

I'll give a specific example, stream of consciousness style partly out of laziness. We have a software component, and a portion will be safety-critical... crap, things just got more expensive. We know we need to develop the device under a risk-management plan (ISO 14971), so we don't need consultants to tell us that, but we may need them do to a design review because we don't have enough in-house experts (how many do we need?). We know that the software component must be developed under a SDLC (ISO 62304). Should we do it agile (as per AAMI TIR-45, not cowboy agile nonsense), or a more traditional V-model? Does CMMI or PSP apply to us? Should I listen to the nice people at IBM and use Harmony, or are they preying on a poor (emphasis on poor) innocent startup? It'd be nice to have a consultant advise us, based on their experience, that one or the other works better for a startup. Have we properly identified the safety-critical portions of our design? What should the development environment look like: is MISRA-C everywhere the right answer? Probably not. So MISRA-C for the safety-critical portion, and regular C everywhere else? Or should we do Java/RTSJ with a fancy JVM? Ada/SPARK? We could justify any of these, and probably others. What are the costs of tooling for each choice, licensing costs, how hard will it be to find employees/contractors (should we use contractors? how many will I need to hire?), and what will productivity look like? What about maintainability? Is QNX better than VxWorks? Is model-based systems engineering worthwhile, or is it an expensive buzzword? Those nice people at IBM said Rational is great, and it'll tie into DOORS! And they said DOORS is great! Maybe I should use Excel instead of DOORS, I heard from a guy on the internet that works just fine. And so on...

So for much of this, we want an experienced consultant that can review case histories and show us that in the past, comparable companies were successful by doing X, and so it makes sense for us to go that route too. Many times we know we need to do something, and frequently how to do something at a larger company, but not the optimal way to do it at a startup. I can do a decision matrix, but without the case histories, there's too many gaps in the matrix to be useful. We also need to have external people for design reviews, and figure out when we need to pull in those external people, when we don't, and when we should. I need to be able to tell the regulators that our processes were based on industry best practices. I need to be able to tell board members the same, and be able to tell them that our processes and plans have a successful track record at comparable companies to justify the time/cost/etc. I want to be able to show shareholders that we're being good stewards with their investments, and we're doing that by making careful, informed choices.

I was working for an avionics startup that was facing the same problems. The necessairy ingredients to get a system certified were all just way out of reach for us. For example, the asking price for the DO178 certified operating system was around 200.000 Euros. Then another 200.000 for the safety critical OpenGL drivers. And so on and so forth. In the end, we went with a Linux based noncertified system which could be used in the aircraft via an expensive "minor change". We sold exactly one device an went bancrupt. Killed by IPad & Co.

I'm a software developer working on point-of-sale at one of the major companies in this field. I've worked at the same company for my entire career, and have no plans on leaving. I've found that the retail software industry seems to be very "sticky" -- lots of people with 20, 30+ year histories at the same company (or sets of companies). Even those who leave seem to stay in the general industry, sometimes even returning to the same company. The company I work for gives plenty of opportunities internally to transfer between projects and teams, and there are many different software stacks in use, so there is always something interesting to work on.

It sounds like a really great place to be and I am curious as to why it's as "sticky" as it is even for software developers. Would you mind sharing more details? I'd be happy to chat on HN or email.

That's a good question, and probably one I don't truly know the answer to. I've been here my whole career (~11 years), so I simply don't have any experience outside my company or industry to compare against.

I imagine that some of it probably has to do with the large amount of domain-specific knowledge you gain when you work in the retail software business, although I'm sure that is true to some extent anywhere. That knowledge is very valuable when looking to hire someone into the business, but may not translate to anything tangible outside of it. It is actually something I worry about a bit, so I try to keep my skills sharp in other areas as well, playing with other software stacks and keeping up with the latest trends. I really enjoy programming, and problem-solving in general, so luckily it doesn't feel like a chore. I've always joked that if I won the lottery and could quit my job programming, I probably wouldn't because I enjoy it so much.

Speaking specifically about my employer, there are quite a few reasons why I have no intentions to leave even after more than a decade. Our cost of living is pretty low here, so the salary for an experienced software developer is sufficient to support a family of four comfortably, including owning a 2000+ sq. ft. home and putting away a good amount for retirement. That means that I do not need to look for "outside promotions" to increase my salary. It also gives me some hope that I won't run into some of the difficulties I hear about older software developers getting hired later in their careers. I personally work on a mature product, so there are rarely "crunch times". I generally work 40 hours a week +/-, some of them from home. Travel is minimal, and I do not have to carry a company phone, so I feel that I have a very good work/life balance. There are advancement opportunities available within the company, both for the technical and management track. I've seen people hired in as call center employees progress through to senior project management and technical experts.

Sorry that I don't have a simple answer to your question, but maybe explaining what keeps me here explains some of it.

Thanks - no apologies needed. It's good even if you do share your own personal opinion. I'm just interested in how I can build an organizational like that where software developers are happy. I've observed how project/tiger teams can stimulate enthusiasm but eventually, it fizzles out, the product gets shoved into the face of other developers who really don't want another new thing to maintain and everyone's just unhappy. Anything you can share on the culture side or what your company does to help keep software developers motivated?

I'm working on what I currently call "IMDb for Drones", although I really need a better way of describing it! Here it is: http://www.RCPartRatings.com

If you haven't heard of it, have a play with PC Part Picker. Making something like this for your site would be really interesting IMO.

This is really really cool. I've worked on similar systems of bundling together parts, and your site is well-executed. Maybe you could call it "Pricewatch for Drones"?

This is great! I was thinking about building my own drone, but was having trouble finding a starting point.

Do you mind to share what stack are you using to build it?

I'm working with two SaaS startups to build analytics-driven marketing platforms based on an open source CMS. Both clients create tools for technical teams, and both are solidly profitable. One of them is from the Bay Area and on Series D. The other if from Scandinavia and on series A. In both instances, the previous version of their web presence was developed by the same dev team as their core product, and their marketing/growth team was competing for development time from the same devs who were building their core product. The platform we've developed enables non-technical marketing teams to easily push out new initiatives and new content, rapidly measure their results and correcting course. At the same time, their team can be confident that their site will work smoothly across a broad range of devices and platforms. By combining software development skills with knowledge of marketing tools and best-practices, we've created a nice niche for ourselves.

I'm also working with a Fortune 100 client to develop an intranet platform for them. It's an awesome project, and I wish I could say more than that, but we're under a rather restrictive NDA. We're working on producing a case study, and getting it approved by their legal department. We've done some other large intranet projects before (federal agencies and global NGOs) so this is another strong niche for us.

I often encourage developers to combine their technical skills with another domain-specific specialty to create a compelling value proposition. It's great to be a "Javascript developer" or "Python developer" but with that positioning, you are easily commoditized. By combining technical skills with a non-technical specialty you are much more resistant to commoditization.

I am working on wrinq[1] an application that helps people manage their rental property. Not a niche domain (or maybe it is since I don't see many applications for the real estate sector except for listings) but we are using niche technologies.

It is built with openresty and couchdb both of which I feel are terribly underrated technologies.

"How is it working out?"

On the technology side. Everything is going great. I read a thread on micro-services a while ago and with couchdb (if you take time to think through) it is really easy to have micro-services that can be distributed. We've got 5. While they are not independently deployed yet they can be at any time. It's only a mater of replicating the existing data(very easy) and changing the urls(easy but needs some thorough testing).

openresty makes it really easy to communicate to in house as well as some third party services we use. I smile every time I write:

`local res1,res2,res3 = ngx.location.capture_multi{{"url1"},{"url3"},{"url3"}}

It is very satisfying to see the results of different independent apis coming together in a single call.

Both of these technologies are very resource efficient,openresty in particular. And we have tested high loads of traffic on cheap servers without making any effort to optimize.

On the business side. We are doing okay. Making sales is always a challenge but people are interested in talking to us which is a good sign, I feel. Only a matter of time before we perfect our product and pitch. We are in no hurry :)

[1]https://www.wrinq.com/

I would definitely invest in a better landing page, especially one with some screenshots of the software. I googled 'landlord software' and found a fair few - http://www.landlordvision.co.uk/ seems to be the most popular and their landing page looks pretty decent.

I am, admittedly, surprised by the lack of SaaS landlord sites. There are a fair few but most look very dated and uninviting.

Thanks! and yes we could do with a better design. The challenge for us has been to find a good arrangement of all the text that we have (may be we should cut some of it out?). Landlord vision looks beautiful.

Think my niche is programming in news. Something between a programmer, an editor and a reporter. I don't work on the core CMS because we have dedicated teams for that. What I specialize in is all the things the CMS can't do, won't do, or isn't designed for, like interactives. Or this http://projects.voanews.com/ebola-tracker/ ; the tracker data is updated manually because it has to be reviewed (sudo vi ebola/data) but an automated watch script alerts me when the World Health Organization updates their ebola stats every few epidemiological weeks. I like using RaphaelJS for making graphics.

Currently, working on 3-4 editorial projects. First one is a bit dry, a metrics dashboard done in Node.js that gets top pageviews from our articles and then scrapes titles, number of article comments, facebook shares, tweets. Some real surprises there - an article can have 10x number of fb shares than pageviews. As in, the teaser photo + summary is enough for people to share and not read in entirety. I like node. Also (probably unsurprisingly) but facebook is faster than our own sites for scrapes, even though we use akamai / CDN.

Next up is a parallax-y report on fourth of July for our Learning English division. It's a longform writeup laced with some cinemagraph-style looping videos and embedded quizzes explaining the constitution and a bunch of Americana to our international audience. The internal tool we generate these projects with (tool separates content and programming/design) are a mix of PHP / Smarty templating that I want to convert to node with some realtime collaboration features, but once baked the final reader-facing stuff is HTML/JavaScript. Looks kind of like this http://projects.voanews.com/central-african-republic-diamond... project. Funny thing is the internal tool is called "timeline editor" and it does everything except timelines. It should be called interactive editor.

Also, oh boy, I made that map in the article and am so proud of it. It remixed a bunch of complicated and overwhelming data points and simplified it for the reader. Had to do some lat/lng to pixel conversions, some point-in-polygon checks, got the CAR shape polygon list from a UC Davis site and then used inkscape to simplify the shapes because it had millions of points. So guess this kind of programming is a niche specialization for news agencies, and it's worked well for me, going on 7-8 years now.

Damn, I'm a nerd.

Very interesting tidbit about the 10x number of FB shares. I sometimes wondered why FB keeps showing me so many news on sites outside of FB, sending me away from their site. But I guess they don't send away quite as many people as I assumed.

Yeah, participation from any kind of passive teasers or pushed content is a lot lower than you'd think. If we launch a new project and post a teaser about it on our very homepage, it's a coup if we get a 10-15% click rate. Think that low clickage number is pretty standard across news sites, and well, sites in general.

Anyhow the part that's interesting with facebook is that there is no homepage on facebook. Everything's fairly temporal, so you only have a brief period of time to capture interest. On top of that, it's a hit/miss possibility that you'll start a chain reaction of interest, so I'm amazed when there's a 5:1 or 10:1 or 20:1 ratio of shares to pageviews. It means that facebook as a content platform is totally plausible, which I don't like.

An new programming language paradigm: https://vimeo.com/107069470

Really tough going, but have a first customer in its initial incarnation: brodlist.com

just finished working on my first real fully automated + autoscaling + distributed application environment a few weeks ago. The the definition/spec for all of it is on source control; nothing is done manually at go-time.

It gives you the same type of confidence about your application environment that you experienced for the first time when you switched to automated application deployments.

the various "click the build button" workflows that are implemented so far:

1. base images for all the different server types get built/updated. any future environment updates will upgrade machines to the new images.

2. an entire new named application environment (minimum ~15 VMs) gets created (webservers, background services, cache servers, database servers, etc..), configured, and applications deployed to. creating a new environment for, e.g, performance testing is as simple saying "build: performance-test-env"

3. an entire app environment (any of them) gets updated based on any configuration changes made since the last update/create.

4. various normal application deployment automation

Yo Davis! Shoot me an email about that sometime, I'm actually setting up something similar-sounding at my current company (though not at scale yet).

A new methodology, agile/scrum but more humane.

Been an IT developer for most of my life but always found humans and how they work more interesting than computers and finally I figured out how to do something good with that interest.

http://timeblock.com

http://Gamedevr.com - Links and resources for game developers.

Im trying to get into game development, and decided to create a website listing alot of tools and resources that i think are usefull.

The main objective is to be community curated, by adding your own links via Github. The problem is that im also a newbie webdeveloper and havent spent alot of time learning about source control and Github especificaly.

Im learning as I go, thats why i havent realy posted it anywhere.

Im planning on adding alot of resources, fix alot of stuff and then realy tell people about it.

Ill just leave it here, for some feedback from you guys.

Ps: Sorry for my terrible english.

At the moment my niche is 'game development'. Specifically the development of a web based game at a medium sized (400-500 employees I believe) game company. So nothing really out of the ordinary there.

Our tech stack is also pretty standard for a game of this era PHP and MySQL backend, frontend is HTML, CSS and JS. Version control with SVN.

It's definitely been eye opening for me, debugging old code that hasn't been touched since the mid-noughties can be a real challenge. However this has taught me to be more thoughtful about how I code, and to plan out how I'm going to build something efficient and maintainable.

Market Intelligence as a Service - Insightico (http://getinsightico.com)

Exploring if we have a viable business after several people have told us that it's useful. We're still trying to land our first customer though the challenge is focusing on the right customer segment since it spans multiple industries.

Funny enough, I did have a job choosing and picking technologies such as Oracle/Microsoft/etc. I worked at a high growth startup at the beginning and then went to work at large corporations to get a balance of both worlds.

site not working when entering email, getting error about CSRF?

Chirp - A new smart notification center.

It's still being developed but here's the landing page to give an idea: http://welcomechirp.com

SETaaS - Software Engineering Teams as a Service

Trying to find out if the bootstrapped productized service at http://www.thinkbridge.us/setaas.html is viable.

Targets are businesses with software systems and applications that are to be developed and maintained at a smaller scale but need continued access to technical talent.

After being a Software Developer for 15+ yrs, learning marketing & sales :)

https://askpatron.com fast single screen customer feedback with rewards for small local businesses. It's a work in progress and I am doing things that don't scale right now. I have four businesses that are helping me beta test. I am looking for more. The overall goal is to improve the customer experience using a system that is super fast and super simple to use.

Refitting the architecture boat to sail seas of information instead of motoring commodified ponds of construction? So far, it's not appreciably less successful in real terms and even if my valuations and probabilities are each off by an order of magnitude or two in bad directions, the expected return is higher per time unit of effort simply because piece work cannot scale well.

And writing.

My niche is training sysadmins on CFEngine. Been doing it part-time for 5 years; just got a full-time gig as a CFEngine consultant for a year and wondering when I'm going to have time to continue developing/expanding the training but happy to be working on CFEngine full-time as it'll help raise my expertise.

Niche: embedded systems Working on - "at work:" a large medical instrument; "at home:" an industrial monitoring platform with a web interface.

I really like my niche. I've believed that merging embedded control systems and "the web" was long overdue, and finally industry is catching up with that belief.

Modelling religion and extremism using a combination of behavioural economics/psychology, AI and a few other snazzy buzzwords.

We believe that if we build on this framework correctly it is possible (maybe not probable) to eliminate major extremism and are about to kick off our seed round to scale it..

Frighteningly ambitious, but fun

Previously i had worked on a mobile app product Tweelerts (tweelerts.com) and now i am working on a Parse like service which let you share you static data ( text, json, XML, files or any other data) over API. No coding required you just need few click to set up and server data over API

i'm working on automating texture compression for game authors. i'm imagining a tool that automagically compresses assets for best quality and size, and very quickly, in a way a game author wouldn't have to even know it's happening. At this point i'd like to talk to game authors about their texture compression pains.

I work on a lot of projects and love doing the concepts. in parts I consider myself an Artist and Explorer. My qualities are a good sense for abstraction and having a broad knowledge (as opposed to specific expertise) and knowing how to communicate between people. The tech side is often too much work and to complicated for me to go beyond a proofs of concept, but as I do most just to satisfy my own curiosity I'm feeling great with this.

My Passions are structuring knowledge, perception, society, art, sound, music and love.

I'm not so much career focused, but I'll see what opportunities I can find, once I finished my Diploma:

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1. PostPriori - combining news aggregation with twitter like personal subscriptions, exploring weighting of content beyond:

- a suggestion engine (not yet good enough for the finesse of a personal taste, scary because out of direct control, biased towards easily digestible content)

- democracy (simply does not scale. Might work for niches, but look at the shift in reddits audience. It has to become mainstream. Subreddits are a fix, but not a very elegant solution I think)

- doing it chronologically (one needs to filter the mass of input, making actuality so important is not the right way I think and a huge problem in the media. I'm also incapable on using twitter as is because of this.)

I have a few things to try on how to keep all the ratings very human and hand-choosen by those you personally trust. I also want to try to enhance viral distribution and allow for semi-classical editorial institutions.

Further discussions about it are very welcome!

It will become my Diploma in Arts, so I'm free for now from commercializing it. You can subscribe to a newsletter which I will send out once beta-testing starts:

http://signup.postpriori.com/

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2. All of It - A personal, local Wiki.

I recently started making a wiki out of my notes. I will yet have to see on how to cramp the naturally ribosomal information there is in to some hierarchy with cross links.

To stay true to the nature of information I'd need a more associative indexing, but i won't build another google or some other brain. :)

I'm using markdown, http://wikitten.vizuina.com/ and owncloud.

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3. musical experiments

- I'm writing sort of a firmware for a midi keyboard to play quarter tones. (using this http://www.keithmcmillen.com/products/qunexus/ it has 2 pressure sensors per key, so I can split keys easily once I have the raw data)

- I'm planning a responsive, randomized effect array.

From my instrument (a trumpet for now), I try to extract how I play (pitch, volume etc.) and randomly assign effects to certain locations in this matrix. Once I like a certain location I will fix it and shuffle everything else. Over time a a spectrum of curated effects will be fixed on the range of my playing. I hope for something like bending down a loud C and having it distorted, than when I go silent it suddenly becomes roomy with a reverb and things like that.

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4. I'll join another startup on monday. I want to build something to make money, not just sell my time/workforce.

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5. I do some freelancing as a web developer, throwing together and customizing CMS'.

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6. a relaxing students job at the state television

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7. Other small jobs: media installations for exhibitions and artists, photography, proofreading (in german, spare me my mistakes here :)

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edit: added projects and edited a bit

finance + user experience