Dr. Daniel Manson is a neuroscientist-turned-developer based in London.

At the moment, he is a software engineer at the London-based  LandInsight – a company providing services for land developers in England and Wales.

But back in the day, he was a Neuroscience PhD student at the University College London. There he worked in the lab of the 2014 Nobel Prize Winner John O’Keeffe under the supervision of Dr. Caswell Barry. 

Daniel started developing software while still in the academic quarters. During his PhD he managed not only to perform  his own experiments, but also to contribute to the community with his excellent  waveform GUI for hippocampal and entorhinal electrophysiology data.

In this episode, we discuss

–> why Daniel decided to leave academia

–> how his days at on the job differ from the daily grind of the PhD

–> why working for a start-up is sometimes like playing a strategy game

and more!

This time I altered the closing questions to match Daniel’s scientist-turned-developer expertise

1) What was the hardest skill to acquire during your transition to industry? 

Being able to say “no” to some of my creative impulses and just do what I was required to do.

2) What are the core skills for an aspiring developer?

Solid knowledge of Mathematics. This teaches you how to express yourself succinctly and it makes you appreciate what makes a statement really true in the strictest sense.

3) What are three programming languages you would recommend starting with? 

C (it is easy to understand and learn) –> JavaScript (programming a game or an app is fun and will keep you motivated) –> Python (for scientific computing, I just hate MATLAB)

Happy Listening!