[JunkDNA]

I work in biomedical research building software apps. We are grant funded with tiny teams. Every little thing that allows us to go from idea to reality helps. Python, Django, Postgres... Hell even Twitter bootstrap (we don't have time to screw with styling, but stuff needs to look professional) are all critical for us. The more stuff we can use off the shelf to solve ferociously hard biomedical data problems, the better.

Concrete example: there is a paper in Nature that just came out where some discoveries were made on the genetic causes of congenital heart defects. Our team did all the data integration work to create a resource those researchers could use to do their work. I'm proud of what we have done, but there is so much more we could be doing for them if we could only move faster.... If our tools were better. We haven't switched to using Light Table yet, but we will if it lets us do more with so few people.

I often wonder if the creators of the open source tools we use ever imagined their stuff being used the way we use it. Did the Postgres team ever think someone would try to shove 100's of millions of DNA variants of folks looking for a cause for their disease into their database? Did the JavaScript library teams think someone would be using their stuff to show radiology images to people studying hearing impairment? Did the Django team ever image someone would build a biomedical data integration framework on top of their web framework so biomedical researchers don't have to reinvent their particular wheel every time?

If you build great stuff that is useful, it will have an impact in ways you can't possibly imagine.