Havoc's Blog

For the last month or so, I’ve been working at Continuum Analytics, doing product design and development to help out data scientists. I would be overjoyed to hire a few more awesome people to work with, and I’m hoping some of you reading this will be interested enough to learn more about it.

If you’re used to a “software geek” vs. “nontechnical end user” dichotomy, data scientists might challenge your assumptions. They are a technical audience and they write code, but many wouldn’t consider themselves general software developers. Some of them are research scientists who write code to analyze their data. Others work in industry, finance, nonprofits, and journalism. The “data scientist” title could refer to a domain expert who’s picked up some coding, or to a software developer who’s picked up some statistics. The best data scientists, of course, are good at all sides of the hybrid role.

A cool thing about data scientists is that they are focused on a non-software goal (understanding some aspect of the world through data), rather than tangled up in software as an end in itself.

Peter Wang and Travis Oliphant, from the open source Python data science world, are the founders of Continuum.

At Continuum so far I’ve been involved with Bokeh, which boils down to a specialized UI toolkit for building interactive data visualizations. (Most of the technical challenges are the same ones found in any UI toolkit or “canvas” library.)

Here’s the first small feature I’ve been working on, auto-reload of Bokeh apps:
 

(This idea is not new, shout out to Play Framework, Bret Victor, and Bruce Hauman for the inspiration.)

There’s a lot to do on Bokeh but it’s only part of the picture. For the projects I’m a part of, we’d like to hire more people with a background in building apps, UI toolkits, vector graphics libraries, and the like. There’s room for both design and development skillsets (anyone who cares about user experience, understands that it has to work, and knows how to make it work). The tech stack is mostly Python plus web tech (JS/HTML/CSS). You might enjoy the projects at Continuum if you think apps that involve numbers and data are neat (think spreadsheets, IPython Notebook, Reinteract, for example); if you enjoy UI-toolkit kind of problems; or if you like the idea of designing a development framework especially for data scientists.

There are a couple of official job descriptions on the Continuum site focused on web tech (web application architect and web application developer).  However if you come at this from another background (as I do), such as UI toolkit implementation or spreadsheet implementation, that would be interesting too. If you have a track record of good work as a developer or designer, that’s what counts. Enthusiasm for open source or data science are big pluses. Official applications should go through the website but feel free to send me email and ask questions.