Day 2 of the PRIDE\/OLS Hackathon is done and over. We've been inducing small brain seizures in 10 people for the last 2 days with PowerPoint overdoses. The good news is that we have a good spread of cookies and tea and coffee. The bad news is that we still have more powerpoint.<\/p>\n
On the plus side, this exercise has forced us to write tons of good documentation – which any decent programmer is loathe to do. This will also be a good preparation for the Thursday morning talk I have been volunteered to do in a month for the whole sequence database group. But I digress.<\/p>\n
The hackathon has also been a good training ground to see what kind of mistakes\/problems people will experience in the wild. We know how to run the programs – we should, we built them from the ground up. What takes us a little less than an hour to do from scratch is proving to take more than a day for the average user. Mostly, it's because everything works on our laptops. In the wild, we need to deal with older\/newer versions of stuff we need, different languages, different operating systems, different ways of thinking of how stuff should work. It's proving enlightning. And frustrating. But that's a whole other story.<\/p>\n
On a completely different train of thought, I think that we've actually beginning to be regulars at the pub. We had dinner with the course people there tonight (paid by the EBI). I wanted to bring back a chocolate tart for Katy (as she was feeling a bit down) so I asked for one to take away. The waitress went to place the order and came back a minute later saying that the chef wanted to decorate the plate (as they normally do when you eat it at the restaurant), if they did garnish it prettily, would I mind bringing the plate back tomorrow?<\/p>\n
In a word… sa-weet!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Day 2 of the PRIDE\/OLS Hackathon is done and over. We've been inducing small brain seizures in 10 people for the last 2 days with PowerPoint overdoses. The good news is that we have a good spread of cookies and tea and coffee. The bad news is that we still have more powerpoint. On the…<\/p>\n