The other day I had the chance to visit a life science software company which I found really cool. I won’t mention the company’s name or what they do, but they seem to be the kind of company I often talk around these parts and have for a long time.
First of all they run lean; small agile teams, a mix of biologists/informaticians and developers. An agile development process, a RESTful web application written in Ruby on Rails with heavy use of Capistrano for managing roles, and a computing backend running on Amazon EC2. That everyone had Macbook Pro’s as their primary machines was only gravy . The best part is that they are not alone. Whether these companies succeed or not, I’m increasingly seeing or running into life science companies out there, and research organizations that seem to be embracing modern web frameworks, data processing paradigms like Hadoop, lean software development principles. Hopefully we can get some of the older guard to follow suit in the near future. If the business models, which are also somewhat innovative in this space, work out, then the incumbents will have to follow suit, or face more difficult times
Since this visit was work related, need to put up the usual disclaimer
Industry watching: The new life science software company
The other day I had the chance to visit a life science software company which I found really cool. I won’t mention the company’s name or what they do, but they seem to be the kind of company I often talk around these parts and have for a long time.
First of all they run lean; small agile teams, a mix of biologists/informaticians and developers. An agile development process, a RESTful web application written in Ruby on Rails with heavy use of Capistrano for managing roles, and a computing backend running on Amazon EC2. That everyone had Macbook Pro’s as their primary machines was only gravy
. The best part is that they are not alone. Whether these companies succeed or not, I’m increasingly seeing or running into life science companies out there, and research organizations that seem to be embracing modern web frameworks, data processing paradigms like Hadoop, lean software development principles. Hopefully we can get some of the older guard to follow suit in the near future. If the business models, which are also somewhat innovative in this space, work out, then the incumbents will have to follow suit, or face more difficult times
Since this visit was work related, need to put up the usual disclaimer
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