David Bioinfo -

Why ‘rm -rf’ is scarier than a pipette tip, and other truths of digital biology. Introduction: Hello, World (of Omics)

You can have the cleanest pipeline, the most parallelized code, and a server with 1TB of RAM. But if you don’t understand the biological question, you’re just moving bytes around.

The first rule of : Always check your checksums. david bioinfo

As David the bioinformatician, my real value isn’t typing fast. It’s knowing when a result is biologically plausible vs. computationally correct but nonsense .

Hi! I’m David. Ask me what I do, and you’ll get a different answer depending on the day. Why ‘rm -rf’ is scarier than a pipette

The hardest part of my job isn’t the code—it’s the interpretation .

bwa mem genome.fa sample_R1.fastq sample_R2.fastq > aligned.sam samtools sort -@8 aligned.sam -o sorted.bam freebayes -f genome.fa sorted.bam > variants.vcf Then I wait. This is when I practice patience. And refresh my email 47 times. The first rule of : Always check your checksums

I’ve learned the hard way that a single misplaced flag in cutadapt can turn your precious RNA-seq reads into biological confetti. My morning ritual? Coffee. htop to see if my server is crying. And grep to make sure my adapter indices didn’t cross-contaminate.