Note: I am still working on NeuroOn signal analysis. You can expect to see the hypnogram¹ comparisons first together with time-synchronized signal files and all the code in an open Jupyter Notebook²

Hackerspaces and biology

As a long time Citizen Science and Open Source supporter I love the idea of Hackerspaces³ - collaboration workspaces allowing individuals to work on their own technical projects, sharing tools and knowledge. I consider them a vital counterpart to Academic research labs, where people are not bound by strict rules and grants. Hackerspaces excel in very disorganized research and development of various IT and electronic projects, producing a lot of open designs and proof of concepts⁴.

Many researchers point out that it is possible only due to the nature of IT and electronics allowing rapid prototyping and near-instantaneous results - something which couldn't be replicated in more time-consuming experimental sciences such as chemistry and biology. I'd like to disagree with that point. While it is impossible to achieve the same speed of prototyping as in IT or electronics …

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Edit 29.09.2016

The analysis and all the data files are available for peer review at my Github.

NeuroOn Today

I was intending to start a blog for a long time, kept back by the feeling that I didn't really have anything valuable to share. This changed when I found a Polish startup - NeuroOn¹ over two years ago. My first post² expressed all the hopes I had for the sleep mask and skepticism at the clear disregard for scientific standards of its creators. Since it consists mostly of quotes I don't want to risk misinterpretation of IntelClinic employees by translating it fully. I ended it with the following paragraph:

The NeuroOn sleep mask cannot work exactly as advertised - it cannot utilize a proper EEG signal. While it can detect a REM phase in sleep very roughly, it's very far from reliable sleep analysis. The majority of the population isn't able to achieve polyphasic sleep, since their brains aren't capable of that. A similar thing goes with lucid dreaming. NeuroOn at its best …

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For some time I've been using React JS stack in my professional projects at X-Team and I decided to share some knowledge. React is just one piece piece of puzzle, requiring Redux, React-Router, Webpack and Babel to create truly interesting architecture. I've met many people having problems with grasping that, struggling to go beyond simple component state of their application. Since I had similar problems learning this modular approach, I decided to give a short presentation on the topic.

Initially given on April 27th in a wonderful Noisebridge hackerspace, I updated it a little after React Europe 2016 and presented again at MeetJS Warsaw on the 7th of June 2016.

The presented application of React + Redux is just a simple view authentication method, which nicely highlights the simplicity of the architecture. All links - including "by then you should know" are clickable, so feel free to browse sources recommended by me. All code itself is either runnable or has a pseudocode warning on the slide.

Slides are available in an iframe below or at my slides …

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This time I wish to share a recommendation. For two years I've been developing in JavaScript in Angular, using various in-house habits and techniques of my respective employers. I have tried vanilla JS and CoffeeScript, Grunt and Gulp, Jasmine and Mocha, various deployment models. I have been learning various tools on my own, but I always seemed to lack the understanding of what is their specific place and strength in a project.

I never really got what's so good in React and Webpack, even though I've completed the tutorials before. I got myself to understand ES6 and BabelJS, but never intuitively realized the potential of const and modules, even though my taxBrackets project uses a lot of their functions.

There are lots of great tutorials and showcases of various tools, showing how each of them can simplify and speed up the development. Still - nothing can replace seeing an experienced professional make most of his toolbox and guide you through their work process.

Recently I've seen such a guide, creating a simple yet representative app in …

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Hah, my first technical post on the blog, even if very lame :)

During the last year's elections in Poland a truly leftist party surfaced for the first time in decades, proposing to raise the taxes with a progressive tax system. It turned out that a lot of Poles didn't know how such a system works and became terrified by the thought of a 75% tax for the richest.

That convinced me to create some kind of visualization of various tax systems - be in flat or progressive. This is an early stage effect of my works: TaxBrackets 0.1, available at my Github.

I've been meaning to sit down and work it out for months, and starting wasn't easy - the most important factor was a clear and simple design. It had to present an average person how the tax brackets are distributed in their gross salary. Iterating between versions with varying level of details I finally settled on relative simple one, which shouldn't feel crowded.

I wanted to create two view modes: 'general', showcasing the sum …

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