*TLDR: I'd like to show Julia to my colleagues, but don't have a clue which cool packages and features I should show off to them, because I don't do any scientific work myself.*
Hi, I'm an interaction designer working for a research group at Karolinska Institute[0]. Basically, I'm a glorified front-end webdev. I don't do any scientific work myself, I'm just building a web-based interface for browsing and visualizing single-cell data for them. So my use-cases don't seem to align with Julia's strengths, but I like the design of the language, the ideas behind the project and have been following its development great pleasure. Last week while watching a bunch of JuliaCon videos during a lunch break, one of my colleagues asked what the video was about. I tried to explain the Julia project to him, as well as the language's strengths and weaknesses. Sadly, I didn't really do a good job of it, since I don't actually program in it myself. He said it looked a lot like Matlab (his language of choice) and was interested in the free-and-open-source aspect. But he expected there to not be enough packages yet for him to work with it and was sceptical about whether switching to it would be worth it. I tried to explain that Julia can call out to Matlab code with practically no overhead, but he didn't really look convinced (and I didn't have a working Julia environment to show it off to him either). While Jupyter was also a turn-off, since he doesn't like notebooks, but the Juno video compensated for that a lot. Basically, I'd like to show Julia to my colleagues, give them some pointers on where it might be fun to start playing with it, what are some of its amazing features *that matter to them*, but I don't have a clue of what I should focus on to do so. The researchers I work for are molecular neurobiologists. They're doing pretty well, having published in Science last year and this year, see here[1] for a list of publicatiosn. Currently Anaconda is the "lingua franca" platform, but some in the group prefer Matlab or R over Python. Of course, one of Julia's selling points is that it's a very "inclusive" language, so I definitely could show that, but I don't know what else to demonstrate. I'm hoping there are researchers here with similar enough use-cases for Julia who could give me some suggestions about what kind of things they might really like over their existing solutions. Cheers, Job [0] http://linnarssonlab.org/ [1] http://linnarssonlab.org/publications/
