xroja

I've worked at a top research university for the past 15 years as a research software engineer. Many of these comments have some truth but a lot are definitely not universally true.

Poor compensation: Yup, I'll cop to that. I could be making way more in "industry" but I make enough to live and I don't build ad-ware and do take pride in my work.

Being a PhD but little respect: I actually have the opposite experience. I'm not a PhD, I don't even have a Masters. But I can write decent software and I get respect and recognition from my PIs and other top-tier faculty that we've collaborated with. I feel like I've gotten just as much respect with my humble BS in Comp Sci from a state school than if I got a MS/PhD.

Micromanagement: I have the total opposite experience. I've worked with the same group for a long time, maybe that changes things. We apply for and receive grants to work on projects. We make high-level assertions for what we will do during the course of the grant and our PI gives us lots of lee-way to meet the goals of the grant in whatever technical way gets results, is FAIR, and open. Granted, I may have just lucked out here.

PharmGKB.org @ Stanford University | Software Developer, Web Developer | Stanford, CA | ONSITE | Fulltime | https://www.pharmgkb.org/

Come help advance science and medicine!

PharmGKB.org is a leader in the field of pharmacogenomics, how our genes affect our reaction to drugs. We combine our curators’ scientific expertise with our developers’ coding expertise to catalog and deliver valuable knowledge to our users and collaborators. Our coders gather data from many sources and deliver knowledge to our users via web applications, REST APIs, and desktop applications. We are about to deploy a major new redesign of our site (https://next.pharmgkb.org/) so now is a great time to join.

Applicants are expected to be experienced developers but not required to have biological or medical background. The best applicants will have a clear and working understanding of how to build modern web sites and services while taking the lead on projects in a small team of other developers. A good candidate will be comfortable working with server-side code like Java & Python and modern web frameworks like React and Redux. If you just like coding and building things this may be the right job for you.

Since we are part of academia our work/life balance is excellent. We are work in the beautiful new Stanford Engineering Quad on the Stanford campus. We are a small team so you could have a big impact in this very exciting field.

To apply, head to http://jobs.pgkb.com and follow the link to apply through the Stanford careers site.

PharmGKB.org @ Stanford University | Software Developer, Web Developer | Stanford, CA | ONSITE | Fulltime | https://www.pharmgkb.org/

Come help advance science and medicine!

PharmGKB.org is a leader in the field of pharmacogenomics and precision medicine. We combine our curators’ scientific expertise with our developers’ coding expertise to catalog and deliver valuable knowledge to our users and collaborators. Our coders gather data from many sources and deliver knowledge to our users via web applications, REST APIs, and desktop applications.

Applicants are not required to have biological or medical background. The best applicants will have a clear and working understanding of how to build modern web sites and services while taking the lead on projects in a small team of other developers. A good candidate will be comfortable working with server-side code like Java & Python and web frameworks like Reactjs, Ampersandjs, and all sorts of other ES6 modules.

Since we are part of academia our work/life balance is excellent. Plus, we are housed right on the beautiful new Stanford Engineering Quad. We are a small team so you could have a big impact in this very exciting field.

We are working on posting the positions to our job portal so if you're interested just drop us a line at [email protected] and we'll make sure you get more information from us.

SEEKING FREELANCER - Stanford, CA

Database Architect / Admin / Developer

Hi, I'm a developer in a small development team working in a research lab. We curate a knowledgebase of pharmacogenetic data by having PhDs use a web application to annotate scientific literature and related data. We're relatively small so we operate like a startup (read: a lot of autonomy) within our department.

Project Description - We are looking for a freelancer to work on a fixed-term project that should only take 1 or 2 months to complete. Our knowledgebase is a Tomcat Java webapp backed by an Oracle RDBMS with a Hibernate layer in between. We'd like someone to migrate our existing Oracle RDBMS to PostgreSQL, ensure the integrity of all migrated data, and optimize to perform like a well-oiled machine. The database itself is a non-clustered, non-replicated, single instance (pretty straight-forward).

Qualifications - We need someone with experience architecting and deploying both Oracle and PostgreSQL architectures in a linux environment (RHEL/Ubuntu). Optionally, it would be great if you're competant in Java or have a DevOps-type background. Our institute requires applicants to have a bachelor's degree (or equivalent years of directly applicable work experience).

Contact: [email protected] - Send us a resume, CV, portfolio page, github profile, or whatever and we can start the conversation.

Pretty sure all sessions were recorded. But I think since it was a non-keynote talk it will be part of their video package they are selling. Link for notification when it becomes available: http://fluentconf.com/javascript-html-2015/public/sv/q/677

I was at this presentation at FluentConf today and I found it very interesting. If you can get a hold of the video I highly recommend it.

My project is in that position. We have access to an Oracle site license so we use it. However, we're considering move to a "competing" db, probably postgresql or mysql.

I'm not a certified DBA so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems that any non-trivial use of Oracle systems ramp up in cost very quickly. Both in terms of hard cash and time in education/training.

>It's easier for most of us to understand what Tumblr makes than what Warner Chilcott makes.

I would argue that statement since he says Tumblr is a "blogging platform" and "the latest/greatest means for teens to express themselves". Tumblr is more nuanced than that. It's also a social network and to relegate it to teens seems very out of touch.

To me, it's much easier understand what a pharmaceutical company makes (drugs, a physical product) than what Tumblr makes (blog/social network/place for online advertising/???).

Have you thought about easing distributed collaboration for structured data? The use case I'm thinking of is multiple groups submitting data to one central informatics/analysis group (i.e. consortia, meta-analyses). Scientists still throw around data in excel sheets with ever-increasing versioning through file names (e.g., gene.data.v29.201230429.janes.final.Final.reallyFinal.xls). It's a huge time-suck that doesn't help anybody. Support for easy viewing of XML, JSON, or even some sort of hosted RDBMS would be incredible.

I think it's great to target the wider, non-developer audience. They could benefit immensely from version control, distributed systems, and smart editing tools. It could be a big benefit to the whole scientific community.