Ask HN: How can I transition from lab tech to web developer?

I'm going through a similar transition (academic neuroscience -> freelance developer). Can't offer any solid advice since I'm still in the midst of it myself, but I did want to say congrats on getting out of academic science.

I'm not sure how similar chemistry is to biology. But if it is similar, good job getting off the sinking ship. Acadamia is a good fit for about 10% of the people in it. The rest of us are kept in by guilt, stubbornness, and a misplaced sense of duty/honor.

I would look to how I can leverage the two, I know there is a lot of open source in these fields and that does not create a great opportunity for direct payment for your development efforts but their are ways to leverage your knowledge of the field and development skills. For example, if your industry relies on aggregating a lot of public data, you may be able to build a company that designed tools that collect that data, and then sell the refined data to researcher.

Or you can always develop out a niche site that caters to that research, where individuals in the industry can get relevant news about the industry.

You can contact researchers in the field and see if they need development services for custom applications and set up a freelancing shop that supports several researcher.

To me there should be a way to combine to two, to compete in a market that you have already built value in. I am not disparaging web development, a lot of people will say web developers are a dime a dozen, but the reality is good developers are probably one of the rarest skill-sets on the planet and therein lies the problem, to become a skilled web developer takes years, I would say almost a decade of experience, because the web is always changing, until you have seen it change a few times, you have not mastered the skills of adaptation. Which are requisite for future-proofing applications.

I am getting off on a tangent, but the point is make sure you are ready to start over, because switching oars now means beginning the assent up river again, for some industries their is no choice, just make sure you have looked at all the options in yours, before you decide it is one that there truly is no choice.

+1 on finding a way to leverage both fields. I've only heard of R and never used it, but I'm sure there are domains where it's the perfect tool for the job. You could potentially freelance to make some side income as well.

I think it's still a good idea to learn web development in general. It's such an interoperable medium. It's dense on the first read, but I recommend skimming RFC2616 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt) the HTTP protocol. It won't teach you to program any specific language or framework, but it's a great way to get a feel for all the pieces involved for a web app.

After that, I recommend taking baby steps and tackling each piece of the puzzle individually. Learn some html/css, build a portfolio page. Then take on some javascript and add some dynamic elements. Then add a backend for dynamic elements you compute server side. For learning coding, nothing beats practice. To improve, write something that solves you own problem, but also look for how other people implemented the same thing (github's a great place to see well maintained and well factored code)

Best of luck!

Yep, I agree entirely. I have a few irons in the fire that merge my knowledge of academic research/biology with software development.

As you mentioned though, academic research is a traditionally difficult place to make much money. The problem is three-fold:

-Many academics are Luddites, that excel file works great damnit

-Academics have extremely small budgets since it is all grant money, and grants are getting ever more difficult to get

-Academics are used to free software, be it open source or something another academic has created. Or in-house expertise. For example have an engineering grad student doing work on our 2-photon microscope, including custom software.

With that said, not many people write software for academics since there isn't much money. If you made something indispensable I imagine you could very easily corner the market.

Regardless, I have no doubt that I need to get out of academic biology. It isn't a sane career choice, where you bank your success on improbable luck, randomness of biological systems and stupidly long hours. Plus the pay sucks until you are 40. :)

Are you working on building a portfolio?

I'd seriously only consider adding your best work into it, even if that's only a handful of things. I've seen people that moving into a new industry, feel they lack experience & add everything they've ever done into their portfolio.

A solid portfolio will get you into a web dev role faster than any academic results.

Build up a range of work, ideally from others requirements freelance work etc. While it's great to build apps from your own ideas, in a role you'll have to follow, interpret and understand the sometimes crazy requirements of others.

Perhaps do a few Elance jobs, offer local businesses or HN even.

R is very much in demand these days. You definitely will want to leverage that skillset/experience.

Focusing on being a "web developer" will merely put you in a ocean of millions of qualified candidates, but being a web-dev who can do things like data-analysis, perhaps info-visualization, and who is conversant in scientific domains can give you a significant edge.

I was thinking the same thing, but from what I can tell there seems to be significantly more opportunities for a web-dev rather than someone that specializes in R. Or I might just be looking in the wrong places...

No, you're looking in the right places if you're finding R related jobs.

Here's the thing: Only you can do the the R jobs, all the web developers can do the webdev stuff.

I'm sure you're awesome. Don't sell your self short and chase webdev jobs that I can pay someone over seas 15k a year to do. Focus on the R stuff, but you're going to have to push a little hard and find a better fit.

When every key fits a lock the key isn't worth much. When you're one of the few keys that fit the lock, you're worth a lot to the right lock owner.

Great advice. The R stuff is definitely an ideal route since I already have some stats and data analysis experience. At this point it's just a matter of getting a bit more familiar with the industry and figuring how to find these types of jobs.

Drown yourself in code (writing and reading) and make things. Even if they are simple, or insecure, or very, very inefficient. Just make them. That experience alone will help you get better.

To more specifically answer your question - find something that's bothering you, and make a web-app that tries to fix it.

Develop a nice, one pager app. On anything of interest.

It's hard to realize this until you start doing small projects, but as a programmer, you have an ability to gather and analyze data in a way that 20 non-programmers won't be able to do...not just physically, but even conceive of the same ideas.

So take an interesting set of data, write a script that converts it to an interesting HTML chart, and you'll be surprised at how much it'll amaze people. I hate to use this example because it's kind of ugly, but this simple map I made of New York museums's free hours got a lot of attention for just being simple aggregation (and a Ruby script to generate the sloppy HTML)

http://iheartnymuseums.com/