Wanted: Programmer, full-time, for Web 2.0 Genome Browser

We're bringing the power of social networking to the genome project. Help make a contribution to the greatest scientific endeavour of all time!

Project description

The AJAX technologies incorporated in Google Maps have further augmented the user experience and seeded a burst of community map annotation efforts. Zooming around the satellite views makes the user experience an order of magnitude easier, and helps avoid problems like getting "lost" in the map layout.

Now imagine how easy it is to get lost if the map you're viewing is of a genome: somewhere you've never seen, except through the lens of clunky Web 1.0 CGI scripts that take forever to reload even when you only want to glance a few hundred nucleotides upstream.

We want you to lead development on a fast, smooth-scrolling, community-taggable genome browser to be developed using AJAX and other technologies.

Early feedback from our prototype indicates that this browser could transform the way biologists look at genomes.

This is a chance to be involved in a Web 2.0 application that could influence the direction of bioinformatics in a profound way. What if you could tag your own genes.... mark up a microbial genome with edits for a genetic engineering lab... view the human and chimpanzee genomes side-by-side... (add other life-altering possibilities here...)

The prototype is at genome.biowiki.org (limited functionality, Firefox only). The project also has a wiki.

For bioinformatics, the emergence of Web 2.0 means faster tools, more interactivity and the rumblings of a Wikipedia-like community movement in DNA sequence analysis. Contribute to development in this prestigious open-source area and take advantage of this opportunity to build a revolutionary scientific web app with the potential for worldwide uptake and use.

Location

University of California, Berkeley.

Experience

The ideal applicant will have experience in three or more of the following areas (and be primed to learn all of them):

• Javascript/AJAX programming
  • Prototype, Dojo, Rico, script.aculo.us, Google Web Toolkit, AJAXSLT and/or other open-source Javascript libraries
  • Cross-browser portability
• Perl and/or Python, Ruby, other scripting language(s)
• SQL databases; MySQL, PostGreSQL
• XML, XSLT and related technologies

Salary

University of California, Berkeley, Grade: Programmer Analyst III.

Salary dependent on merit and relevant experience.

Contact

Interested applicants should email a resume, and links to representative work, to Ian Holmes.

Watch this space for further info.

Jobsearch blog

The job has now been filled. Welcome Mitch Skinner!

-- IanHolmes - 02 Jan 2007

The job classification is Programmer Analyst III.

The job is now officially "open"...

-- IanHolmes - 04 Nov 2006

I'm awaiting classification of the position to get the UC Berkeley salary grade & title, but it will be one of the Programmer Analyst ranges.

Google's support human got back to me (closely followed by an email from Google itself, asking me to rate the human's performance). So I'm now free to post ads. w00t!

You gotta love Google's classification of our "business". Apparently we are "Education, Religion". Is that because I mentioned Perl? (Update: could it be a veiled reference to the High Programmers?)

-- IanHolmes - 17 Sep 2006

I tried to create a Google Adwords account, but buggy Google won't let me enter my credit card details (though it did promise to have a codemonkey investigate, and to send a supportmonkey to chase after the codemonkey).

You know, given that I'm trying to hire a coder (& am one myself), I've really gotta stop referring to them as "codemonkeys". We're Ultraviolet High Programmers, dammit!

My ad was something like "Web Genomics 2.0. Build an AJAX browser for DNA. Join the project of the century!"

The last sentence is a direct ripoff of David Haussler's "Join the greatest scientific project of all time!" (http://www.hhmi.org/bulletin/pdf/fall2004/GroundLevel.pdf) and actually should probably be an even more exact ripoff... it worked well for him anyways... got Krishna Roskin on board.

And, you know, it's true.

The Googs balked (rather primly I thought) at my capitalization of the word AJAX. I had to write a little note explaining why it should grant me an exception to its NO CAPITALIZATION policy:

Necessary capitalization of the word AJAX, an acronym for Asynchronous Javascript And XML... as you well know.

-- IanHolmes - 14 Sep 2006