First let’s take a step back and think about the definition of science: The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. Now, when we think about what kind of experimentation goes on in…
TL;DR: Over the previous hundred years, a lot of work has gone into standardizing the way scientific data is presented. All of this knowledge has been largely forgotten. I want us to bring it back to life. Before we talk about science, let’s take a short but scenic…
TL;DR: An open API for science helps researchers discover great software. Install the Scholar Ninja extension and you’ll get recommendations (based on software citations) on-the-fly while browsing GitHub. A while back I wrote about an open distributed search engine for science, Scholar Ninja, and about how great it…
TL;DR: I’ve started building a distributed search engine for scholarly literature, which is completely contained within a browser extension: install it from the Chrome Web Store. It uses WebRTC and magic, and is currently, like, right now, used by 0 people. It’s you who can be number…
Years ago (yes, it’s been years, don’t remind me), I wrote an application for modeling the laser ablation ICP-MS mapping process. This is a thing where you make microscopic explosions with a laser and then the little bits of the stuff get blown into a blazing torch, which…
I recently asked myself if it is possible to say, based purely on tweets, whether it’s sunny in San Francisco or not. So I recorded all tweets from Tue Jan 21 12:33:21 UTC to Sat Jan 25 13:36:16 UTC, limited to a bounding box of:…
Introduction The topic “GitHub for Science” has been explored quite a few times before (1, 2, 3, 4) and with good reason: it is quite exciting to envision what breakthroughs in scientific collaboration could come from GitHub backed explorations, with substantial capital to invest and a formidable team to execute.…
I’m a medical doctor by education, but I'm not practicing medicine. I finished medical school and shortly after graduation in 2011 I was already on a plane to San Francisco to join the great folks at Academia.edu and be a software engineer. Although I liked being a doctor,…
Written for a project. I developed the backend for this social wellness mobile app - WellWith.me One of the most common uses for a backend connected to a mobile application is to use it to send push notifications to users. Once you've wrapped your head around it, it's pretty…
This post was written for a game development project. We were building a real-time strategic running game. TL;DR: We used MapServer, MapCache, PostGIS, PostgreSQL, Open Street Map and a bunch of other awesome technologies to build fast and cheap maps for Jog of War. Here is how. When we…