Hello! I am currently a Bioinformatics masters student at the University of British Columbia, though I am mostly spending my time in Canada’s Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre. While many of my classmates are doing cancer-related research. I’m doing some text-mining work on biomedical literature. I’m supposed to graduate in like a year (This paragraph will hopefully be updated soon)

What’s bioinformatics? Some of us are biologists who know how to use command lines and do intensive data analysis without using Excel. Some of us are borderline computational biologists, building tools for bioinformaticians and biologist to solve cancer mystery or developing models to rationalize biology. It’s a huge field that is almost like a miscellaneous box for things (and people) that don’t fit entirely into Math, Biology, Computer Science, or Engineering.

Anyhow to the point: bioinformaticians or bioinformatics students spend a lot of time googling for answers and trying to find answers through trials and errors. The next generation of students or researchers then has to repeat the same thing again. Or worst: we forget and we google for the same things again, much like how we just keep searching for how to git whatever or how to get the line number of a file in the terminal, etc.

Through this blog, I will document things that I have spent time on so that other people don’t need to go through the same speed bump. I have thought about how to contribute to the world besides generating a master thesis, and I think this is probably the best by-product: save people’s time so they can be more productive.