CAcandeira·Mar 9, 2019
I second "develop any software for your domain", with one addendum.
Do you use excel for anything at all? Whatever it is, you could start by building that.
- Do you put data into a spreadsheet and then email it to someone else? Make a web app where you put in the data using your account, and the someone else can view the data using your account.
- Do you have different spreadsheets with separate data than then gets aggregated/summarised manually into a single spreadsheet? That's a job for a computer program, not a person, and you can add that as a feature for your web application.
- Once you've done that, you have a website that can work with the new data, but some people will want it on spreadsheets, not on the website, so write a spreadsheet export/download feature.
- All your new data is in the website, but the old one is still in exce
Read the rest
l spreadsheets on your hard drive. Write an importer to read the spreadsheet data into your application.
- Is some of the data for your lab in a format that's also machine readable (barcode format?). Add to your app support for reading barcodes, either via phone cameras or laptop webcams: https://github.com/serratus/quaggaJS
I could go on, but I guess you know your next step better than I would.
A recommendation is also that you do all your development at home, not on company time, and not using any company resources. A lot of profitable business are website implementations of existing spreadsheet workflows. In the past three years, I've worked on two such applications, three if you count a physical device UI where the prototype UI was developed on Excel + Visual Basic.