Post 7: Things I Learned the Hard Way in Bioinformatics 🤕

Top 7 (Most Disturbing) Things I Learned the Hard Way in the World of Bioinformatics (so far):

1. Reading articles is useless if you don’t write code and experiment with it (failing many times). Sometimes it reads easier than it seems. And if you don’t practice it, you forget it.
2. Never trust a database, no matter how “manually curated” it is advertised. Visualize everything!
3. Have all your code organized (a folder with “source” data, results, notebooks, scripts, etc.) and commented (description or links to pages where you found the solution). If you work in the terminal, always have a “readme” file with a description of the commands and directories.
4. If your script doesn’t run, you probably missed a “;” or misspelled a path/variable. It’s not because the machine is wrong.
5. Briefly check how a piece of code in a program works before using it. Sometimes, the authors of the code do something that messes up the analysis.
6. Underscores, even if you don’t like them at first, will be your best friends when naming anything. Try to use an idiomatic style when naming anything instead of names that only you understand (e.g., gibbs_energy »> ddG).
7. Anything you plan to do, someone has probably done it before, and there’s even a program that will make your life easier by automating the process. Don’t be upset when an algorithm replaces you.