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i am doctor sam nicholls

Tat tinkerer, bug hunter, burger flipper

Prima donna programmer at Oxford Nanopore. I make our bioinformatics workflows run harder, better, faster, stronger. In a previous life I wrote a long book and a nice paper about metagenomic haplotyping, but you probably know me from the UK’s COVID consortium. One half of Sam & Tom Industrys, creators of cheap labware and Monster DNA Lab.
I will be writing about tat I have made and bad code I have written.

$ ls -lt samposium

Goodbye Wordpress: Mirroring my Wordpress blog

Starting this incarnation of the blog obviously begs the question of what to do with the old Wordpress one. I am aware of several posts from around the internet that backlink the old blog, and I will absolutely not commit the internet crime of link rot. I do need to maintain the integrity of the existing pages, but I don’t want the trouble of migrating my old posts to be a prerequisite of getting started with Hugo, as I will just choose to do neither....

August 31, 2023 · 5 min

Hello Hugo

Eight years ago, I enumerated the reasons I shelved my Jekyll powered Github Pages site in favour of begrudgingly adopting Wordpress again. I had gone around the simplicity-complexity cycle once more and was yearning for more features (having previously wanted fewer features) and more flexibility (having previously desired less flexibility). Back in the days when my job was merely to turn up to class on time and print tat in three dimensions, I had the time and energy to learn how to install and manage arbitrary tools and services....

August 28, 2023 · 5 min