This site hasn’t had a post for couple months, and there’s a reason for that: I’ve been out of town, doing some collaborative work on-site, but now things are getting back to normal.

This most recent sabbatical destination was Florida, which made for an odd justification when returning north across the Canadian border (I didn’t want to miss any of the nordic winter, because this is just such a great time to be back here). The purpose of spending a month or so way down south was to pitch in with a small startup called Chemical Semantics. The company is more or less in de facto stealth mode, but the name is quite self-explanatory. I kept busy improving the core product’s cheminformatics capabilities, to make it more appealing to those of us who conceptualise molecular structures as mnemonic diagrams, rather than RDF triples.

Post-return, I also have something of an announcement to make, though in the greater scheme of things it is more of an incremental development: I am now officially part of the Collaborative Drug Discovery team, and for the foreseeable future, will be devoting a large fraction of my working week contributing to various projects, remotely, from my arctic man-cave. The projects I will be working on are many and varied, and will tend to lean toward exploratory scientific efforts, e.g. algorithms that are hard or not guaranteed to work, exotic visualisation techniques, and experimental use case scenarios.

With the rest of my time, I will continue to work on all of the numerous projects, both solo and collaborative, that I have going on under the banner of Molecular Materials Informatics, as well as a bunch of new ideas that are sitting around on the drawing board. Realistically of course, some of this workload will have to be reprioritised, which is a shift in direction that has already begun: some of the mobile apps that didn’t turn out to be as lively in the marketplace as originally hoped are being consolidated into a smaller selection of products.

Other than that, though, it’s business as usual… and time to update the stable by making everything work with iOS 9 on the iPad Pro. I’m still not sure what the rationale is behind having such a gigantic screen, but my apps will be updated to make use of it.