Steve Yegge quits Google in the middle of his speech [OSCON Data 2011]

The problem with calling out specific companies for quality is things can change -- eg, Pixar, who would have clearly belonged on his list a couple of years ago, but post-Disney, post-Cars 2, post Newt being cancelled for Monsters Inc 2, post the Canadian branch being formed to shit out TV specials... well... things can change (including for the worse) quickly.

This past week, I decided to start working on a project to build a new type of speech synthesizer. Did I know anything about acoustics or linguistics? No, but I've been reading what I can find about them since then.

I used to have a philosophy of intentionally choosing easy, "overlooked" problems. I figured I wasn't that smart, so I should just stick to the simple stuff. The software I built was good and useful, but a lot of it is already becoming obsolete. I want to make software that will last 50 years, not just 5.

This talk came at a great time for me, and it's strengthened my resolve. I'm going to keep learning about speech synthesis and acoustics (which means a lot of math and physics that I slept through in school), and hopefully I can push the field forward a little bit.

My gut feeling is that there is a large need for good query/visualization tools of the datasets the sequencers produce. At least, I think if researchers could "play" interactively with data they would be pretty excited. But I am most definitely non-expert in this area, so take that with a grain of salt. I sometimes think about whether or not tools developed with column stores (e.g., the programming language J or something like KDB+) would actually be cool for data exploration.

For visualization, check out:

http://genome.ucsc.edu/

Also, a huge list of projects is at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome_browser

In the genomics analysis space, it seems that I hear these three tools mentioned for sequence alignment are tophat, BWA, and MapSplice.

http://bio-bwa.sourceforge.net/

http://www.netlab.uky.edu/p/bioinfo/MapSplice

http://tophat.cbcb.umd.edu/

These are actively maintained projects that I think are mostly developed inside of various academic research groups.

There is also The Cancer Genome Atlas project at:

http://cancergenome.nih.gov/

You can probably find research groups via TCGA that might appreciate some one-off development or support, but it might not be exciting from a tech viewpoint.

There is a ton of EMR (electronic medical record) data out there in free text. If you have skills or interest in things like Lucene/Solr, I would bet that almost any research hospital might appreciate your time and skills. And, if you talk to the right group, want to hire you . . .

I fit the mold you are talking about. I started working for a neuroimaging lab about 1 year and a half ago. Basically I'm not a scientist at all, did Math as an undergrad but almost no stats or any of that type of vodoo stuff (topology, abstract algebra etc real math stuff is what I did ;p).

So basically I had no clue what Neuroimaging meant or did other than people get shoved in scanner, huge magnets turn and they see inside you ;p

But what I found is there are plenty of computer science problems in a field of Neuroimaging (and neuroscience) that a programmer can help with. (processing, image analysis, data mining, storage, Visualization whatever) Most labs don't really have people who's primary job is programming. Thus there a lots of tools that are just hack jobs long forgotten that no one is maintaining but everyone depends on. Those things can be helped out by good programming practice and with real programmers behind them. What sucks is getting funding for these people but Open Source can help here by pooling multiple people from many labs into common projects.

Also, if you do work with scientist, most of them will talk to you for hours about the science of what they do. You can usually ask the most stupid question and they will be happy to answer it. I've found that most people I work with are open and even more if the work you do helps them achieve their scientific goals. So in the end if you need to learn some science stuff, they will usually be helpful.

(BTW my project is in my profile, will be open source soon, waiting for some political approval process).