WriteLaTeX founder Dr John Lees-Miller talks to Imperial's ACM Student Chapter on building a scientific startup

Re-blogged from Imperial College London's ACM Student Chapter Seminar Series

WriteLaTeX is an online collaborative editor for writing scientific documents, like papers and theses. It started as idea and a hodgepodge of scripts I wrote as a PhD student. Now we’re a high growth, venture-backed startup and social enterprise, with hundreds of thousands of users around the world. I’ll talk first about writeLaTeX and how you can use it in your work, then about our startup story, and finally about some of the technical challenges we face in bringing a 30-year old technology (TeX) online and in scaling up (e.g. I’ll mention Docker, Ruby on Rails, data protection, cloud services, and bugs, lots of bugs).

John is cofounder and technical lead at WriteLaTeX, a London-based startup and social enterprise that builds modern collaborative authoring tools for scientists to help make science faster, more open and more transparent. Previously, he read computer science and then did a PhD in engineering mathematics on how to operate fleets of driverless cars efficiently, and he helped design and build the world's first driverless taxi system, the Heathrow Pod, at London's Heathrow Airport.

Find out more about John and the rest of the writeLaTeX team.