A Case for Spaceships (Page 2)

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An open distributed search engine for science

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...

Thoughts on reproducibility of open scientific software

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

How scientific figures should work in 2014

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:

3 simple things GitHub can do for science

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.

About me

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,

How to send iOS and Android notifications from your Rails backend

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

#Winning with MapServer, PostGIS and Ruby on Rails

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

Students build rocket system

In contrast to my first entry’s futuristic outlook, I intend to return to the reality of now with the following words: “Where can I start building a spaceship?” For some very lucky students at Purdue University of Lafayette, Illinois, the answer to that question is an excited “Right here,

A Case for Spaceships

Who are you? I’m a student, living in Slovenia. I study medicine, but my love is coding and design. That’s all good and well, but where is engineering, you say? Where is math? Physics? Chemistry? Where is any skill required to build a spaceship? No, I’m just