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swash

9 karma · joined August 13, 2013

Computational biologist and founder of Paperpile (http://paperpile.com)
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swash··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2022)
Paperpile | Full-stack + Backend Engineers (Typescript, Node) | Remote | https://paperpile.com/jobs

Paperpile helps researchers and students to find, organize, read, and write academic papers.

Our user base is growing fast, and so is the team around it.

You take responsibility for substantial parts of our codebase and develop and ship new features and products. In a small team, everything you do matters and has a direct impact on the work of researchers and scientists worldwide

- 2 full stack engineers

- 1 backend engineer

Stack: TypeScript, Node.JS, React, React Native, AWS, MongoDB

We would love to hear from you. Please apply at:

https://apply.workable.com/paperpile

swash··on Paperpile
Actually Paperpile saves the files on Google Drive so you can always have a backup on your harddisk. You also can export your library as RIS or BibTeX so you are always in control of your data.
swash··on Perl 5.18.1. Yes, it's alive
We're using Perl for a new startup. Our team has a background in computational biology where Perl is still big. Some of us have more than 10 years of Perl experience and if you know the language well it's just insanely productive.

Readability was never an issue. We follow a few common guidelines and with Perl::Tidy we get consistently formatted code.

So in principle Perl is perfect for us, the only drawback is that there is less and less library support for Perl. Most services like for example Stripe have libraries for Python, Ruby but don't bother with Perl (and I don't blame them). Third party libraries from CPAN are usually not that robust and well maintained.

But in general the Perl backend is the most robust part in our codebase and I would not trade it for any other language.