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.

Never got scheduled for night deployment shift. Once i did, everything suddenly catches fire.

Well, twice. In a row.

So... the guy from my last rant completely screwed up a site he'd been working on for our company (blaming the web hosters for their "shitty config" while it was just an error in his .htaccess).

He then proceeded to do it all from scratch (instead of using already existing stuff like he did before).

He asked me to help him out.

I put as conditions that we where going to do it "my" way, with the tools I am pushing at work (Docker, Git, CakePHP and Sass).

He rejected it (as always) saying: "I don't care if the site looks good or works good, I just want something out of the door ASAP".

So I declined because I just can't work with that mentality.

He asked an intern (of which he actually has no saying but w/e) whom barely understands the basics of HTML and CSS to help him out.

Intern agreed and they started working on it.

Two weeks in and the guy takes a nice two week holiday, leaving the intern all by himself :)

something something "I want it out of the door asap"...