tubbzor

IMO you are thinking too far down the rabbit hole. If you are at the point of being implemented by a hospital or healthcare system implies you have already negotiated your product, licenses, etc and have the green light for all facets of what you offer (ie. access in the OR) by the boss(es). Hospital IT will listen to whatever said boss tells them to do, such as allowing access to your app if necessary.

I'm currently working on a cloud-based healthcare idea also. My team and I have been wrangling with the compliant systems and services out there for handling this problem too. The crux really lies in the logistics of the HIPAA standard as every healthcare service storing or transmitting patient information must comply with _at least_ these regulations. Each hospital is liable to run their own EHR system which makes it extremely hard to integrate directly with them in a single broad stroke.

> Am I right to assume that it's nearly impossible to set up a cloud database that is accessed directly from, say, the OR of a hospital?

It depends on you, the employees, and the hospital. HIPAA basically focuses on 3 factors for securing and storing sensitive data: (1) Physical data security, (2) Security of data in transit, and (3) Training of personnel with access to the data. Amazon has HIPAA services that handle (1), 3rd party services like you mentioned above or you can handle yourself for (2), and also 3rd party services or yourself can handle (3). Assuming you have (1) and (2) squared away, and assuming the employees in the OR have the proper training, there should be no compliance violation.

Just wanted to drop in and sing my praises of this service and team (WriteLatex/Overleaf). I am currently a grad student and have been using this for ~3 years and it is my absolute go-to for HW, resume, reports, project papers, etc. It is also simple to add collabs which makes it great for team projects too.

The new addition of conference/journal templates and integrated spell check is really opening it up to a broader audiences than just CS-centric users.

My friend (with very little coding experience) saw my resume and asked for help to craft his own. I sent him overleaf.com and a template and he was able to get started with LaTeX in their side-by-side environment and was able to add his own content very easily. I know without this service it would have been a headache setting up LaTeX for him locally and walking him through it, so props to the overleaf team for abstracting the tech this way.

Bitcoin?

For what its worth, this is only for convenience purposes for those who want to use Bitcoin without having to handle managing their own keys (ie. grandma and grandpa) or want to avoid transaction time/costs that come with operating on the blockchain.

Coinbase offers multi-sig support which puts control back into the user's hands in the event Coinbase went down or was compromised.

Coinbase is a great service for acquiring coin but I generally move it out to my preferred wallet after I purchase it.

I use their free plan with several projects and love it. I am just a fan of their product and think other students/up-and-coming devs would appreciate it too.

I actually filed a support ticket yesterday trying to entice them to get on the list.

As a student (albeit a CS major), I immediately signed up and will be using many of these services. My friends and I have been looking at creating an app and these will def get us started for no money which is huge for us (especially the domain name, hosting services, and private repos).

While I don't feel overwhelmed by all the services, there are some of these I couldn't see how we would immediately use such as data analytics.

I just wish HipChat was on there too :)

I'm not sure what the curriculum looks like for the "business informatics" at your school, but if it's anything like what a similar "business CS" program offered at my college was it is mostly admin/management stuff or setting up and maintaining enterprise software (Cisco routers, using Microsoft products, ect). I had a friend who took a 300-level (Junior) class as an elective and they introduced Vim/Emacs halfway through and tested on it...we were both amazed at that level many of them hadn't even written much code, worked on a large code-base, or had a grasp on any programming paradigms/design patterns yet were getting a degree in a computer field in less than a year. I guess it goes to show how different levels of abstraction can be applied to CS to get a job done (ie. they didn't need to know how any of the tools worked internally...just how to use them to accomplish a job).

> Will chosing the "business informatics" major make me drastically less employable in software engineering positions, even if I have a good portfolio of personal projects?

Drastically? Probably not, especially if you have some projects under your belt to demonstrate your skills. If your goal is to be a "software engineer" though, I think you're better off getting a CS degree because it directly feeds into a software career.

> Will I miss out on a lot of core concepts in the theoretical & technical Computer Science courses, which will make me less proficient in programming later on?

Of course you will miss out on some things. There is a reason these are 2 different programs at your school because they are aiming at teaching 2 different things. CS dives into theoretical components such as OS design, programming paradigms and design, algorithms, ect. Now you can learn all these on your own of course, but I find it far more difficult especially at a higher level of understanding. "business informatics" (as I understand it), is about putting software in place which is going to aid business in some way or possibly train you to be in some sort of "software management" position.

Just my 2 cents though.

I'm currently a fully funded graduate student 'interning' for the USDA and working on (mainly) agriculture modeling software. I found this job as an undergrad through an e-mail system set up at my school for potential employers to reach out to the CS undergrads/grad students for temporary or long-term work. This system can get annoying as even after you have a job, you still get spammed with mail from people looking to hire CS students to do anything from working on their projects to teaching them basic computer skills.

Another note is there are (at least where I work), potential for HPC personnel and they aren't even hiring for these spots. For instance, I was recently talking to a programmer who works with population models. He has no parallel programming experience so he writes his models sequentially and runs them for months and months at a time. If they had a parallel specialist of some sort (even on a consulting basis), their research would be greatly sped up.

I really like your approach here. I think for beginning (and intermediate) app developers, after learning some language syntax, design is one of the hardest things to overcome. I skimmed through the first section and will certainly be diving into it more this weekend (and watching some videos).

One nitpick is the description text accompanying the section titles in the syllabus. Reading the paragraphs of white text over the images make me strain my eyes to read or have me scrolling so the text falls over a dark part of the image which makes it rather busy and distracting to read.

Thanks for this resource!