I'm a computational biologist who is interested in genomics, machine learning, and too many things for my own good. I mainly use R and Perl in my work and have been trying to learn Python. This blog started off in 2010 as my online notebook while I was doing my PhD and still serves as my online notebook. I usually write posts as I'm learning something new, which is why most of my posts are prefixed with "Getting started with x". Sometimes I write posts because I've been asked the same question several times and it's easier to refer people to a tutorial.
During the years, I have considered giving up blogging but several things have spurred me on. I get the occasional direct message that my blog has been useful and that's very motivating! I still get a lot of traffic to my blog, so I'll assume it's still relevant. And finally, I actually like writing technical documents because it lets me delve into a problem/tool. Recently, I learned from a friend that my blog was included in the Top 75 bioinformatics blogs, which actually only goes up to 68, so the quality of the list is perhaps, questionable. That said, I'll take any recognition I can get and present to you this shiny medal 🙂
If you are interested in any of the posts on this blog and/or have a question, just leave a comment or feel free to email me@davetang.org and I will try to answer as soon as possible. Or if you found a post useful and just wanted to let me know, feel free to email me as well. All comments are moderated and will only appear after approval. Due to the large amount of spam, I may miss genuine comments.
To date, I have around 1,000 real comments on this blog, so even if Akismet classifies everything as spam, it is still over 99% accurate (it would have a 100% false positive rate though!).
Dave
26th April 2020
P.S. If you are interested in my C.V., you can find it on GitHub.
