The project where I realized I wanted to go from chemist to pro dev.

I built a flow-chemistry spectrometer with monitoring backend in Haskell.

Spectroscopy is where you add a reagent to a glass tube, it changes color, and by measuring the exact color it tells you how much of something (for example, a toxin) is present in the sample.

I had to do that a lot on factory samples, writing down measurements using pen & paper.

I'm lazy so I decided to do the logical thing: Automate it. I bought a second hand spectrometer, stripped the casing, did a shitload of glassblowing and hooked up tubes to the production pipelines, so I could get samples, mixing them in the correct ratio with reagents in continuous flows using valves.

I ended up using 2 home-crafted arduino-like boards (etching PCBs is fun!).

One to calibrate the mixture against known samples and control solenoid valves to continuously cycle through various reagents and deionized flushing water, the other to record the measurements and send them to a server running a Haskell/Yesod API.

The server collected the information into InfluxDB (A time series database), displaying all data on a graphite dashboard.

Eventually I wrote Haskell plugins for most of the chemistry processes, from pH & temperature measurements to polymer property and pigment tests (they made a lot of printer ink).

Then I was fired because they didn't need chemists anymore, and the code "could be maintained by the intern" (poor guy)...

But I did find out that I loved functional programming, chemistry automation projects, and crafting my own electronics during that time.

Hate the urge to rewrite, when a new major version of your JS library is out....

Especially when you're at the last laps of your project...

When angular 2 came out I started working with it on a project and it took some work to migrate from razor to a SPA.
I had a buddy say "You should take all that time and effort and invest it into learning native app languages. This Angular thing is another passing fad". Lol
He eventually started learning it and I was suggesting he'd implement Polymer with his app so if he needed to use the same component in another project, it would be easier since Polymer has a small dependency cost, and offers framework agnostic implementation.
He then told me, "Polymer is not gonna gain any ground because google is behind Angular more so than Polymer." Lol
Anyway, happy Tuesday, y'all.
Oh yeah, he also said that typescript would never stick. :)