Chatted with a friend and fellow developer after a workout. He asked what I was working on, and so I gave him a tired half-answer.
"How did you decide on that? Aren't there a ton of academic search engines?"
The question caught me unaware. I stumbled through it. It was pretty bad. Of course, on the drive home I was angry with myself for not immediately shouting the answer.
Yesterday, we released another major neo4django milestone. You can get it from PyPi or GitHub.
Because the library is not feature complete- in particular, the lack of relationship models is a problem for many Neo4j users- the milestone is merely a minor revision number. This milestone is important for a few reasons, however.
The decision to release a piece of software into the wild can be difficult. Do you wait until you've fully expressed your vision, or push it out early in the hopes of greater community participation? If you push it out, will it be taken seriously? What if the kids on the Internet don't like me?
Scholrly is working on a Neo4j/Django integration layer based on neo4j.py 's Django support. The layer emulates Django's ORM at the model level, so it has to do all sorts of metaprogramming backflips.
My personal favorite result of those acrobatics up last week.
In December, I made a big move. I quit my job to work full time on a startup.
My friends and family are tired of hearing it by now, but I have yet to share my personal experience with the world wide web.
During my senior design project at Georgia Tech, I paid close attention to other groups' projects. Four of them were related to medicine- which surprised me, since it seems like a tough space for developers with ideas. Come presentation day, I saw why- they all shared a passionate mentor from Emory.
A year and a half later, I found myself on a call with that mentor- neurosurgeon David LaBorde- and a friend and fellow developer, Corbin Pon. We all came together to brainstorm projects around Emory that Corbin and I could join or start, with David advising. We put together quite a list. Before we ended the call, David mentioned a bigger issue he faced that might be outside our scope, but that might interest us.
He told us that it was difficult to find the right research collaborators in academia.
Matt Luongo is a developer in Atlanta with a computer science degree from GT. He spent his time in school focused on artificial intelligence, networking, and software engineering, and developed a keen appreciation for good coffee. After graduation, he worked with a small consulting & recruiting firm before leaving to co-found Scholrly.