in-house cloud computing + business scalability

The latest issue of BioIT world magazine is dedicated to exploring, how are we going to survive the data tsunami coming with the next generation genome sequencing technologies.

Given the fact that I am bioinformatics engineer, sleeping, eating and drinking cloud computing, the following article caught my attention right away:

http://www.bio-itworld.com/BioIT_Article.aspx?id=94324

It is about GenomeQuest, a company that offers services covering all that follows completion of the sequencing of a genome (assembly, annotation etc) The most interesting part of this article, is that this company has an in-house cloud computing platform.

The best point from this article though which follows that, is that they made the infrastructure choice of an in-house cloud, which in turns allows them to scale up, by outsourcing to Amazon Web Services when business needs increase…

Now talk on scalability, and the power of the clouds and economies of scale in Bio-IT. Read the Big Switch by Nicholas Carr, and then you will be thinking like me on the issue of traditional data center VS cloud, to evolve or go the way of the Dodo (extinct).

the tipping point… (and we’re going live again)

I have been always amazed by the dynamics of the internet… a complex network, similar to the pathways in a living cell, power grids and social webs. It can explode, shrink, change dynamic, all by following purely non-linear dynamics.

A good example of this, is what happened yesterday to this blog… inactive for the past 3 months since I’ve started my new job, it just got 5000+ reads in the past couple of days, as the stats for WordPress’ dashboard show below:

All these reads went to a post from back in May, tittled  software jobs, PhDs and “over-qualification”.

Why did that happen ? By Googling around a bit, I’ve found that a Reddit power-user, BioGeek, posted a link to this post of mine. A lot of commentary followed up on Reddit and also many comments on the original post here on WordPress.

So I guess it all about riding on the shoulders of giants… In any case, this traffic to this blog lifted my spirit, and I decided to start posting to it again after a long absense.

Stay tuned for the updates, which will include knowledge, tips and tricks, opinions and trends, from the new thought space I’ve submerged myself too for the past 3 months; having to do with cloud computing, science as a service, big data and Hadoop, and everything distributed.

software jobs, PhDs and “over-qualification”

The text below is a response to a discussion over at stackoverflow.com, and summarizes my thoughts in regards to how people with PhDs hunting for software developer jobs should go about getting a good position…enjoy the read !

The PhD sometimes can be a problem for simple programming jobs. Even though you are screaming at your prospective employer, saying “yes I’ve done all the crazy stuff during the PhD, but now just want a job to code to feed my family”, they may not hire you not so much of over-qualification, but rather over-thinking. For basic developer jobs, usually employers look for someone that codes like a robot, and not having any academic questions of whether we should use this or that design for the application etc.

Having been to that exact situation myself – trying to get a plain ol’ developer position but got rejected because I have a PhD, I felt really-really bad (and constantly asking the question: shouldn’t the PhD provide me with all the opportunities?). But I kept searching and found something more suited to my PhD skills, and more intellectually rewarding.

That is both the curse and the advantage of the PhD; it opens you the doors for higher quality jobs, but given not the state of economy, but the state of society – how fast things change and similarly how software comes and goes – companies want the 20 year-olds to code quick and turn out an app with a 6-month lifetime.

But still as other people mentioned in their responses, there are places both in private and government sector that invest in long-term budgeted and well researched software projects. So you should be looking for a place like that, but it takes time; It took 6-8 months for me, almost 10 phones interviews and 3 on-site.

And most important get your ego up. I completely understand how you feel, 6-8 years in graduate school under constant stress torn your ego into to pieces. But once you get through that – let’s say – psychological training, you can stand any stressful deadline, juggle many things in your head from software design to implementation, think more broadly etc. These are qualities which none of the 20-year old developers have. Many employers look for those traits, and again get your ego up, think that after 8 years of graduate school you went through things that few people could stand, and get out there and snatch that job.