>Just having a 'compiler' will not change much about that understanding
The compiler is called "genetic engineering" and it's a 30 years old field. In particular genetic engineering allows you to knockout specific genes and observe the phenotype. This technique is commonly used on bacteria, plants and animals. There is an ongoing mouse knockout project, an attempt to study every mouse gene by turning it off. It is 50% complete so far. By the way, the experiments are performed mostly by hand.
>We're very far away from understanding how a particular DNA string relates to phenotypes.
This problem can be solved much faster with a large scale effort. Thousands of automated experiments can run in parallel while recording the phenotype of the animals (including results of behavioral tests) and storing it for later analysis.
On this genotype->phenotype dataset one can train an ML model. Actually there is a company that is trying this approach (just ML part, without automated experiments) http://www.deepgenomics.com/
I doubt that one company will be enough, though. With serious funding there could be much more progress in this area. We could have a full knockout map of mouse genome in less than a decade if we really wanted.
It may not be the solution you expected, but you could try upwork. Pay can be decent and it allows you to live while traveling across exotic countries.
I know a programmer that lives this digital nomad lifestyle.
To use the YC/dev culture to your advantage you have to play your cards in a smart way. Make yourself a name (make a cool html5 website promoting yourself as a professional). Make trendy silly things in javascript, post 'em to github, to show HN. Get upvoted. Comment, gather karma. Don't show your depressive attitude to people, it turns them off (because it reminds them about their privilege of being born into a wealthy country).
Sadly, skills won't make any difference if you don't meet requirements for visa. You could take your time and get relevant degree though (anything CS related should work).
Also you can play DV lottery. It's a small chance (1.5%) but still larger than zero.
I doubt that anybody will help you here. This website is filled with affluent first-worlders (many of them ivy graduates) that live inside their silicon valley bubble. Their rent price is probably several times your salary.
These people prefer not to care about people that were not so lucky with their country of birth.
Start with researching visa laws. H1B is a very common way to come into US for work. EU has alternatives. Note that these visa require BS degree.
As to what to write in your resume there are much better guides online than anything I'd say.
The Moore's law has ended (doubling time has become longer than 2 years, and looks like 10nm-7nm will be the last manufacturing process for a long time). From now on we will see more special-purpose hardware.
Server CPUs have >2x memory channels when compared to consumer CPUs. IBM Power CPUs show that it's possible to get even more memory bandwidth than in mainstream Xeons.
Looks like low RAM bandwidth in consumer CPUs is a mostly artificial differentiator to discourage use of these parts in servers.
On the other hand there are HMC and HBM technologies that offer order of magnitude more bandwidth and several times less latency. They are already used in AMD gpus as well as in prototypes of Nvidia's pascal gpu and Intel's Knight's corner 60-core cpu http://www.theplatform.net/2015/03/25/more-knights-landing-x...
I hope HBM comes to consumer CPUs too, but with current lack of competition in the market it can take a long time.
If governments and FDAs of the developed world were more cooperative it wouldn't happen this way.
Startups don't have a billion dollars for FDA trials.
It looks like (science funding) politics is the only reason we are not testing how these genes work in large mammals and primates. The public is scared of genetic engineering.
>In fact, there’s actually no such thing as big science; we should really be calling it big engineering.
This is so true. Engineering is undervalued in comparison to science. It's easier to sell multi-billion project to the general public if you label it as science.
Scientists are much more publicly visible than engineers; they are Nobel winners, geniuses, brilliant men single-handedly unraveling mysteries of the universe (or so it seems to the layman).
Engineers generally work in larger teams, don't seek individual fame, don't receive their Nobel prize.
And yet our lives depend upon the quality of engineers' work on a daily basis. Our largest global problems (climate, energy, pollution) are engineering problems. Shouldn't we praise engineers more?
>It's a really, really, really big sea of possibilities nowadays for developers.
If you are in the silicon valley or at least in some 1st world country - sure, you have a lot of possibilities and ridiculously high pay.
The sad truth is that exactly same skillset can be valued 10x less or 10x more depending on your location.
The Diamond Age is a great book. Neal Stephenson is known for researching concepts he writes about, so the technology present in the setting is based on Drexler's thesis.
I wouldn't call it "a dream" in a sense that it's utterly unrealistic; physics says that these systems can work.
If someone is interested in real technical description of molecular manufacturing, you may read Eric Drexler's "Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation".
Most parts of this book can be read on the author's website http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/Nanosystems/toc.html , and if you know how to google you can find the whole book.
The book contains a careful physical analysis of molecular machines. The technical material is unchallenged to the present day.