After an absurdly long job search, I’ve finally found myself a comfortable place in a computational biology lab. I’ve been here a bit more than a month and thought I should mention something about what I’m doing.

I’m working for Dr. Michael Brudno in the Computational Biology Lab at the University of Toronto. At the moment, I’m developing an application for visualization and analysis of biological sequence and annotation data with a graduate student named Marc Fiume. (We just chose a name for our project today: SAVANT. I like it.) I’m also sitting in on a graduate seminar on analysis of high throughput sequencing data and attending the occasional presentation on related research at The Centre for Applied Genomics. I’ll be spending one day a week at Sick Kids hospital, in order to interact with biologists and bioinformaticians who are among the target users of SAVANT.

I’m having a great time.

This is all a huge change from the enterprise web development that is more or less what I’ve been doing since 1996. A huge change that I really needed. Sometimes you just need to start over, you know? It was getting to the point where I honestly couldn’t picture myself actually taking any of the jobs I was applying for. I couldn’t face the same-old, same-old any longer.

I’m not sure where this is all going to lead, but I’m kind of hoping to make a career in this relatively young field. I believe that my many years of experience in commercial software engineering will be useful here. I think I can have fun and make a difference. The territory is huge; the problem space practically inexhaustible. I can’t imagine getting bored any time soon. Heading off in a new direction feels exactly right. So work-wise right now, it’s all good.