#Astro

Working with startups for over a decade may have spoiled me. API Developer experience has come a long way in that time, SaaSifying backends to make building companies efficient, logical, and consistent.

Sadly, after months doing “science stuff” my feeling is this is a major missed opportunity in scientific projects and academia (and to be fair, few scientists building these apis are software developers by trade).

In many cases though it feels like it could be better and is impeding scientific progress. And something large scientific and research-based organizations should be paying attention to since it flies in the face of their core missions.

If you write it down, it’s capital-S Science. At least, that’s what one of my grade-school teachers told me (faced with my “samples” collection sourced from field and river near my house).

Science isn’t a lot more complicated than that, but professional academia definitely seems to be. When I decided I wanted to make a go of serious Astro again, it unceremoniously dunked me into a sudden deluge of journal papers, voluminous and near-inscrutable. It’s, well… intimidating… and a seemingly, strange rarefied, almost impenetrable world.