Who am I?

I am a second year Ph.D. student at GMU studying Computational Social Science. Basically, I enjoy building models of how people interact.

I started to teach myself programming in early middle school. Since then, I have spent the majority of my intellectual effort writing code. Currently, I spend the most of my time hacking in Scala. I find it to be an ideal language for writing agent-based models. It's pretty fast, has access to the Java ecosystem, and is flexible enough to sketch ideas. While I am an evangelist for Scala within my academic field of interest, I'm otherwise agnostic. At some point in time, I have built medium to large projects in C, C++, Java, Ruby, Python, and PHP. I have also toyed with LISP, Haskell, Erlang, and Factor, but only at the “worked through an O'Reilly book”-level.

When I was nineteen, I was diagnosed and treated for an extremely rare type of cancer called Chordoma. Immediately after my three month, post-surgical follow up, I founded a non-profit organization called the Chordoma Research Foundation that was dedicated to funding research projects. This organization raised an impressive amount of money considering the rarity of the disease and help build a community of very proactive patients.

Subsequently, a newly-diagnosed individual and his M.D. mother became very involved. Both of them were willing to dedicate 100% of their time to the cause; consequently, it was determined they should run the show. I closed down the Chordoma Research Foundation and folded all the raised funds into their freshly formed Chordoma Foundation. This organization is still going strong and is a model of how to do rare disease research right.

What do I want to build?

Even though I had abdicated organizational responsibilities, I remained very active in the community of those affected by Chordoma. For almost eight years, I have watched how rare disease communities operate. (My surgery was in late February of 2004; assuming I get a clear MRI this month, I will be eight years cancer-free! When I was diagnosed, the mean survival time was 7 to 8 years.) As both a scientifically-curious observer and an active participant, I have gained a sense of the special dynamics that accompany these communities, as well as their unique needs.

When I was initially diagnosed, the majority of the rare disease message boards were hosted by MSN Groups and Yahoo! Groups. Over the last year or two, things have started to change. There are now some impressive community applications, most notably Rare Disease Communities, a joint project by EURODIS and NORD. Unfortunately, I think there is tremendous room for improvement.

That is what I want to build: a fully-managed web application exclusively for rare-disease communities. Please excuse what sounds like an exercise in buzzword compliance, but the most concise explanation I can come up with for the technologically advanced reader -- that is, the reader I am interested in -- is: a karmically-mediated, self-organizing content system that leverages a sophisticated coaching/notification back-end to shape interactions and traffic. In terms of features, think a combination of CaringBridge, Google Maps, HackerNews, and OKCupid.

Why can't I do this by myself?

Paul Graham is probably right when he says single founder startups don't work. (I'm generalizing a bit, but I think it still applies.) My archived projects directory is littered with the several aborted attempts at building this project by myself.

I think it was naive of me to think I could do it all. Good web application developers become good web application developers through years of experience. No, it was not hard for me to learn the latest web application framework -- at different times, Django and Rails and Play! -- but that does not mean I was instantaneously endowed with mechanical proficiency.

This is a “20% project” for me. I like the Ph.D. program I am in and it would take a lot for me to leave. (Although, I do hope to study online communities rigorously, if possible.) Consequently, when something comes up in school that demands extra attention, the project is temporarily put on hold. Even if that lapse is only one week, it's hard for me to pick it back up because I don't have enough experience with web application development. I don't have solidified conventions and reflexive patterns of web application development, so I lose too much time mentally reloading what I need to know.

Who am I seeking?

I want someone to write the front-end while I write the back-end. In reality, things are never that clean, but I am really interested in writing the traffic shaping and coaching aspects of the system, which is (mostly) back-end work.

I am looking for someone with a lot of experience writing web applications. Someone who is good at it, and enjoys it. Obviously, it is not a high-growth industry. Although I have a semi-related project that would greatly benefit from the lessons learned — and perhaps the user base of -- this project, this project will probably not make money. If anything, it will be a steady drain on my bank account. Consequently, I am looking for someone who actually wants to make a real difference in this small niche subpopulation.

Finally, as a recent job post on Hacker News explicitly and elegantly required: I need that person to “not be an asshole.”

Interested?

I think there is no way to know how well you can work with someone than actually working with them on something. If you are interested, please send some links to previous works, or better yet, some repositories that I can read. Even though I am looking for help, I am still very picky.

If you clearly have the technical proficiency, I think the best way is for us to test the waters would be to build some weekend project. Something that requires the intersection of web development and an active back-end. (I have a few ideas.)

Assuming everything goes well, we can set up a legal structure to share the resulting application. Like I said I don't plan on making much, if any, money on this project, but down the road, there are some opportunities that could be explored, and this project may be a stepping stone.