On the complexity of blogging

Some time ago, I contracted COVID and in my deluded state, I installed Hugo in the hope of reviving a blog I had not posted to since 2022. Too unwell to think of actually migrating my content out of Wordpress, I scraped my existing Wordpress site and archived the posts and neatly linked them from my new site.

After all that good work, it has been two years since I wrote the following:

We are one giant leap closer to a freshly abandoned blog.

Indeed, I have found it increasingly hard to keep a blog well stocked with content over the past few years. The trials and tribulations of the life of a PhD candidate losing their mind and financial stability was a crowd-pleaser and offered a lot of experiences to write about. The blog took a back seat as I graduated to my post-doctoral position at the Loman Lab; where Nick and I harnessed the power of Twitter short form content to get our research out to a wider community of shortening attention spans.

Of course, everything was interrupted in 2020. Our lab dropped its research activities to pivot to provide the infrastructure to centralise the collection and analysis of all the UK’s COVID genome data¹. As a large endeavour between so many academic institutes across the UK, the usual sensibilities around credit were heightened; but on top of that COG-UK was a close partnership between the UK’s health agencies which simply made writing about our work feel politically sensitive at the time. There were other reasons to stay on the down-low, members of our project would occasionally get unpleasant messages from those who blamed COG-UK for discovering the variant that stole Christmas.

I am pleased that I managed to get my contribution immortalised in the literature, but save for the occasional “tweet storm” (some of which I am amused to discover have also been immortalised in their own right by the ‘History of COG-UK’ digital exhibition), I don’t have my experience logged to look back on, which is a bit sad given my poor memory.

I defected to industry in 2022 and have since veered away from wanting to write (read: shitpost) about the state of bioinformatics as it feels in ill taste to cast stones from outside the academy. It is one thing to cry out that “bioinformatics is terrible” while in the same boat as fellow researchers trying to make sense of the state of the art, but to do it while wearing my Director of Bioinformatics Software Development captain hat from the top of the crow’s nest feels a bit on the nose.

Once in a blue moon I try to make bioinformatics a better place by educating our users about some common pitfall with using bioinformatics software over on the EPI2ME blog. However my own blog yearns for content.

So what am I doing back here after all this time, telling you this?

I recently solved a problem at work, only to discover shortly afterwards that a smarter, younger version of me had infact already solved this problem. I was immediately reminded of the time I searched the internet for how to safely subset a BAM file, only to find the top result was my own blog.

Writing things down for later retrieval seems pretty overpowered.

If only I had somewhere to do that.