HealthHack Melbourne 2013

I feel slightly cheeky writing much about the event as I didn’t really end up doing very much and felt somewhat humbled and embarrassed by the other attendees.

Anyway, to start at the beginning.

HealthHack 2013 was a weekend hackfest solving problems that medical researchers face. HealthHack brought together medical researchers, bioinformaticians, software developers, data analysts, data visualisers and designers. Together, they created new software tools to analyse, visualise and communicate data.

Organised by a great team in a very welcoming atmosphere it was a surprisingly well attended event considering the niche topic. Read about the weekend and the winners here - healthhackmelb.com

I turned up on Friday night and enjoyed being very well fed and watered and finally got to meet @FCTweedie in the flesh after much mutual twitter stalking.

I listened to the problem statements and must admit it was all a little over my head. I come from a technical background and despite having studied ‘proper programming’ at University it has been a very long time since I really did any and I realise my web work is very light really. Also the technical scientific nature of the problems was a little out of my depth, I vaguely understand what things like DNA are, but when it comes to reporting, analysing and visualising them, way out of my comfort zone.

Still, I found one talk spoke to me at a level I could understand, which was about visualising the quality of academic papers on particular subjects. Working a lot within content management systems, this seemed like an ideal fit to my skills, so I joined the team. However, mixing with a bunch of far superior programmers to me, it was immediately obvious that they had far more complex (and probably more appropriate) solutions in mind and I was a little lost again…

I meandered around for a bit watching what people where up to and went to see if the organisers needed any help, they didn’t, but were incredibly nice to me about everything and we had a very interesting chat about Hack events in general, but I think that’s a discussion for another blog post.

Great stuff and congratulations to all involved.