Forum:Would You Be Interested In Having A Usesthis Like Site For The Bioinformatics Community?

Question

[Drio]

Some of you may have heard of usesthis. In this site people are interviewed about the tools they use to get their job done. The format is very straight forward, participants have to answer these questions:

• Who are you, and what do you do?
• What hardware do you use?
• And what software?
• What would be your dream setup?

I find the site useful and engaging. I thought it would be useful to have something similar but more oriented towards scientists and developers. That is why I decided to write my own version.

I thought the biostar site could be used to democratize who goes in the site.

What do you think?

UPDATE1: If the idea is appealing to the community I'd recommend posting in this thread what people you'd like to see interviewed so everyone can vote. When the person reaches a certain number of votes (>10 ?) I will send him/her an email.

Once I get enough interviews (~10) I'll start releasing one every week.

Keep your suggestions and questions coming.

Thanks,
drd

[Philipp Bayer]

I posted a link to this thread on Twitter, and the author of usesthis informed me that you can just fork his repository: https://github.com/waferbaby/usesthis/

[Drio]

Yes, I explored the option of using his code (https://github.com/drio/usesthis) but there were a few reasons why I decided to write my own. The most important one being that I wanted to have a code base that I can easily modify to add new features and I am more familiar with python than with ruby. Also, I run into a bug that I couldn't track down through the stack of dependencies. And finally I thought it would be an interesting exercise to write the engine myself.

[Philipp Bayer]

I thought it would be an interesting exercise to write the engine myself.

That is the best reason to do anything :)

[Giovanni M Dall'Olio]

it is definitely a good idea, please go with it! :-)

[Drio]

You are also one of the top BS users. Would you like to participate?

[Giovanni M Dall'Olio]

sure, why not! What should I do?

Answer 1

[Neilfws]

I find it a little hard to take usesthis seriously, due to dangerously-high hipster levels and entries like this one. Maybe I'm a little old for it :)

However, I like the general idea of knowing what software tools scientists favour and why.

[Istvan Albert]

That entry is there for entertainment - read more about McAffe (he got rich by selling the McAffee virus scanning to Intel then fought Intel hard to get rid of his name from the product). There are some ridiculous/ludicrous youtube videos that he also made, I won't link to them due to most of them being over the top.

In the end we shouldn't stop someone from contributing, as long as most content is useful the site should be useful.

[Drio]

I was pretty shocked when I saw that picture, the interview is a little bit strange also. But I don't think that's is common trend in the site, overall the interviews are quite enjoyable.

But don't worry, that won't happen on rollswiththis. :)

Answer 2

[Drio]

Possible interviewee: lh3.

[Chris Miller]

Certainly getting some big names (Heng Li, Ewan Birney, etc) would be nice for publicity, but just working your way through some of the top BioStar users would turn up lots of interesting tidbits, I'm sure.

[Drio]

Ok. I will send a few emails and see what reaction I get, specially from the big names.

[Drio]

Ei Chris, you are up there in the user list. Would you like to participate in the project?

[Chris Miller]

Sure, but you're going to have to give me a little time to get my thoughts together. If you haven't heard from me in a week or so, shoot me an email and remind me

[Drio]

Thanks! Sounds good.