It was the season of light, it was the season of darkness - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Here are some lessons I learned from this summer, organized by projects:

MedTech

CovMD.org

It was my first attempt to set up a startup. The aim was to create a forum to connect doctors on COVID-19 related topics. The project did not go as smoothly as we expected after 1-2 month and I have to personally pivot it by creating another platform.

lesson learned:

1. time-sensitive projects can be very risky; we should work on projects that both benefit the current situation and has potential for the future
2. keep an open organizational culture. Keep bringing in new people and ideas. The survival of the venture should depend on a team, not a single person
3. ideation, quick prototyping and marketing

ClinicianWiki.com

This project is ongoing and expanding fast so please email contact@clinicianwiki.com if you are interested. We adopted the lessons from CovMD and I learned how to organize a volunteer team, allocate roles, and many intricacies of dynamic website development.

lesson learned:

1. Treat any team as a volunteer team. People are hardly motivated by only monetary returns. Instead, lead a team along by giving mission, autonomy and growth to the members (and yourself)
2. A self-motivated team can lead themselves and survive even when the founder is gone. Always build a mission-led team and develop leaders around us.
3. Technology: Azure, DevOps, LAMP stack, lean development

App development

I wrote apps for AreteMedTech and Cambridge University Hospital using Flutter and Xamarin (separate projects: one for respiratory disease diagnosis and one for COVID-19 monitoring). I was very fortunate to have great leaders and mentors in both project management and app development from whom I learned a lot. This whole experience strongly reinforced my learning of quick prototyping and exposed me to deeper software and hardware development. I will be continuing supporting these projects.

lesson learned:

1. Working for fewer hours on more days has the benefits of keeping the mind refreshed and seeking support from others when they are available, but the cost of context switching is also high. The optimum should be the number of hours that one needs to complete at least one git commit (i.e. an independently functional unit).
2. Technology: app development including backgrounding, animation, and hardware including Arduino

MedTech Foundation

I was appointed as the National Programme Director for MedTech Foundation. In the next two years, I aim to foster a network and community in MedTech Foundation and build a platform that links different professions and industries.

lesson learned:

Many to come, but so far it has been great fun to organize national meetings and work with fantastic people to build a network that allows people to better connect.

Computational Biology

I am working on a project to correlate rare variant to changes in metabolic level with Wellcome Sanger Institute and continuing my projects of developing diagnostic pipelines for pre-implantation diagnosis with the National University of Singapore.

lesson learned:

1. How to achieve the “flow” state in data science work"flow” (hehe): I have been trying out ways to optimize both data analysis and package development pipelines. The mantra is always to remember that whatever is done twice (or even once) will be done many times so it is important to keep improving the way we do things to avoid spending time working on steps below our calibre.
2. The importance of reproducibility. Again this ties nicely with the previous point. Good workflows should also allow results to be directly produced from data. Use git lavishly and use the release function on GitHub to provide production-ready code for collaborators.
3. The art of data-intensive software design. Data-intensive software has different priorities from app development. It is important to understand which parameters to optimize for (e.g. I/O speed, often project-specific), design independent data structures and unit test data (in addition to code).
4. The craft of presentation. I deeply enjoyed making interactive graphs, dashboards and shiny apps. Rmarkdown has revolutionized scientific reporting.

Personal

I have gone through social isolation, scams and like many people, anxiety about COVID-19. It deepened my understanding of stoicism and mindfulness practice and I am very grateful for the lessons that made me a more mature/self-reliant/rational person. I also prepared and passed with decent results for the first-year medical school examination at Cambridge and I appreciate how this immersive learning experience that taught me the value of focus. It also laid a really good scientific foundation that I feel constantly benefitted from. Thanks to everyone for your support because nothing would have been possible without you. ❤️

P.S. There are also some other projects that I explored and I will share them when the time comes.