Coding is magic. Just think, we can code entire worlds into existence with just our fingertips. And many do regularly with computer games. Of course most computer games are made by teams, but teams of people can create amazing digital worlds for us to live in. Or community spaces online for us to share stories and facts. Writing code is not unlike carving magical runes into stone to imbue it with special properties. Except coding in our world actually works, unlike the runes carved in rocks approach (sadly).
How is a computer asking you for a password not like the doors to the mines of Moria in the Lord of the Rings requiring you to “Speak Friend and Enter”. So we could let ourselves get bogged down in the boring monotony of typing out code to analyse some data, or we can take a step back and appreciate that we are casting spells to give our thoughts actions with an arcane language, whether bash, zsh, Python, R or whatever. Because of this, we are mighty. we are bioinformagicians!
Entrance to the mines of Moria asking in Elvish to “Speak Friend and Enter” and then pseudo-code for opening a door if friend in elvish is spoken.
Anyway, I am back. This blog has been dormant for too long. While I have not been regularly updating, I have been busy reprogramming plants to perform simple Boolean computations (see the paper here) and it has been a real pleasure to have done this and there are many more exciting gene circuit working on its way. However, I wanted to get back to updating this blog with a few new things that I have learnt and I hope that y’all find it helpful.
I am shocked that after not updating it for over 2 years (and not regularly for 4 years) that people still use it and sometimes even message me with thank you notes - you have no idea how much joy that brings me, to know that my silly writings here have helped people. Even more amazing is how many people visit this site even with no updates and no advertising on my part: in 2020 it has over 10k visits! So I am going to release a few new posts over the rest of this year (and maybe beyond). Please feel free to suggest future topics (no promises that I can or will take them on, but I can try).