Recently, I helped establish BioSky – a website dedicated to making medical and health research accessible to people without a scientific background. As we’ve been adding content to the site, I’ve been posting the links to multiple social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Reddit. If I had to pick only one platform to use, it would …

A couple of months ago I was approached by an organisation that provided programming training to staff at companies. They asked me if I was interested in becoming a trainer for them based on my experience running Software Carpentry workshops. After seeking clarification and looking through the teaching materials, I refused.

One of the things you realise once you start learning about machine learning is just how important a well-annotated dataset is that you can use for training. Your predictive model will only ever be as good as the labelled data you originally gave it. A little while back when I was trying to learn how …

Swift is Apple’s new programming language, which promises to allow you to write iOS and OS X apps more easily than with Objective-C. Apple have released a free eBook titled “The Swift Programming Language” which provides an overview of the language. This is where I gained my main impressions on Swift. To give you a …

When I first started learning OpenCV, I was working exclusively with Python. While I am still a huge fan of the language, today all of my OpenCV programs are written in C++. Why? Some of the deeper functionality of OpenCV has not been completely ported to Python (although hopefully the release of OpenCV 3.0 will …

Lately, there’s been quite a few articles (such as here and here) discussing the use of the university lecture and its perceived shortcomings. The question is asked: is the lecture an unengaging relic from before the digital age? Are lectures really the best way to learn? I attended many lectures throughout my undergraduate studies, and have also tried …

I commenced my PhD in bioinformatics at the Australian National University about a month ago and thought I’d share some of the tools I’ve found absolutely essential. All of these tools are free to use (some do have paid plans, however at this point I haven’t had the need to sign up for them). Evernote + …

Line two of the zen of Python reads “explicit is better than implicit” and until relatively recently I never truly appreciated the wisdom of those words. My change of heart stems from a series of Python scripts, where a large portion of my code dealt with automating and retrieving the results of a BLAST search using the …