Informatics Nerd

I had a realization recently, in my software developer role – I’ve become a much better C# programmer because I’ve been programming in Ruby.  A lot of this is due to the Ruby developers I’ve worked with, who have taught me how to do things the “Ruby Way” and the “Rails Way”, or in some cases just the “Right Way”.  Good programmers know that they can never stop learning, and this highlighted the importance of not only learning new frameworks and libraries, but also new languages (and language cultures). I realized the same thing applies to informatics.  I like to think that I’m a better informatician because I’ve been able to learn different informatics “cultures”.  I started my career developing EHR software, and was focused a lot on how to most efficiently collect that information to support clinical workflows.  This, of course, required me (a novice to the field of healthcare at the time) to learn about clinical workflows!  But I was able to adapt to that mindset. When I mad