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.
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.
Recent experiences with Tumblr have led me to believe that the primary purpose of a blogging platform should be to encourage users to blog. World-shaking, right? A product should encourage users to come back.
To that end, I've given up on using Drupal for my personal blog. Personal blogging is not where Drupal shines, and it's a bitch to switch to PHP mode anytime I need something customized.
I resolved to migrate to Tumblr, only to find out that I couldn't preserve old URLs. Ouch. And, honestly, I knew that there'd be some little thing like that that I'd use as an excuse to keep running my own blog. If it wasn't custom URLs, it'd be SSL, or the inability to add titles to picture posts (err!).
So I wrote another Django blog. And so far, I'm pretty happy. There are posts and tags, and some basic stuff I need like scheduling posts. Most importantly, though, I want to blog again.
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.