A few years ago, I wrote a series of posts about the mechanics of consulting, developing business, and setting rates. People have told me that they found those useful, so here’s one about tools. There is a big difference between “doing a little consulting” vs.…
One of the things that we’ve got going for us as technologists is that the underlying reality of biology changes pretty slowly. The human genome has been the same size for at least the last 10,000 years, and maybe as long as 300,000 years depending…
I’ve noticed a shift in the AI conversation lately. Folks seem to be converging on the idea that “AI” means systems that create artifacts (text, images, video, sound, code) so similar to those made by humans that it is hard – for the untrained eye…
I attended three industry conferences (Bio-IT World, Rev4, and BIO) over the last four weeks. This post shares my big-picture takeaway from each conference, as well as a bit about how they stitch together. I think that I may be the only person who attended…
This is the fifth in a series of high-level posts reviewing foundational concepts and technologies in genomics. The first four were: “How Many Genes Does a Person Have,” “How do Genomes Vary, Person to Person,” and “Sanger Sequencing,” and “Sequencing by Synthesis.“ The “depth” of…
I would like to talk about tech debt’s sneaky sibling, something that I think of as “operations debt.” Tech debt is the accumulated burden of shortcuts, approximations, defects, and hacks that creep into a product or system as the team focuses on production rather than…
I used to make a pretty decent living installing the Linux operating system on bare metal servers. Nobody does that anymore, or at least nobody brags about it on social media, which is basically the same thing. It was a good gig. I traveled the…
This is the fourth in a series of high-level posts reviewing foundational concepts and technologies in genomics. The first three were: “How Many Genes Does a Person Have,” “How do Genomes Vary, Person to Person,” and “Sanger Sequencing.” This one is about high throughput DNA…
I’ve heard from several independent consultants lately that prospective clients are pressuring them to cut rates and justifying it with the old fallacy about how your hourly rate should just be your annual salary divided by 2,000 working hours per year. I have written about…
More than 20 years ago, fresh out of school in the 90s, I built artificial intelligence (AI) systems for a military contractor. I trained neural nets, used natural language processing to populate decision support systems, experimented with genetic algorithms, and refined support vector machines. In…