Hello world,
I think it’s nice to give the code I write a bit of context, by including some autobiographical detail.
I have a BSc in Maths and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex, which taught me plenty of theoretical, pure maths (which has, somewhat perversely been rather useful in practice), and how to program (in a range of uncommon, not very useful, languages, although I hear Lisp is making a comeback).
I then worked for a few years developing Microsoft Excel and Access stuff, so I’m a dab hand with a spreadsheet, and the colour schemes of my databases have been widely admired. I also did some SQL Server work and some website development, which back then involved writing HTML, Javascript and CSS. Now, I write in XHTML, and regard Javascript as a necessary evil – I think it’s a horribly counter-intuitive language.
Seeking a new, more interesting direction, I did an MRes in Bioinformatics at Birkbeck College, which I very much enjoyed, to the extent that I am now halfway through a PhD in the subject, at the University of Manchester. In between these two degrees I worked for 3 years in a lab at Cambridge University. I’ll describe the work I’ve done in bioinformatics in greater detail in subsequent blog posts; here I’ll just say that I’ve done lots of Perl development, and that I am very good at building and querying databases (MySQL and Postgres) and rifling through massive datasets.
That’ll do for now, I’m getting a bit bored writing this, so you’ve done well to make it this far…
Cheers,
James
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