Things I Have Learned

  • Nothing works. Ever.
  • In the event that things do work, you just haven’t discovered what didn’t work yet.
  • I’ll never finish everything.
  • There is no consensus on anything.
  • We like to pretend quality control isn’t a problem.
  • Backups are hard.
  • My life will forever be plagued with off by one errors arising from interfacing with different bioinformatics tools.
  • People will sooner like a picture of your breakfast than an interesting picture of what you are working on.
  • A PhD from Aberystwyth comes with a well honed skill in the detection and prevention of seagull based food theft.
  • Conferences tend to remind me I am not a biologist, statistician or a computer scientist but a horrible chimera of the three
  • You should have a healthy paranoia in an analysis being wrong, doubly so if it is yours
  • Public engagement is surprisingly rewarding
  • blast output 6 gives you the percetage of the hit, not the query cover, and only tells you the number of gaps, not their length
  • Just don’t edit the headers of a BAM file yourself, ever
  • If you say something is simple, you’ve just found this week’s most difficult task
  • Software is not obliged to adhere to any or all of a format specification
  • gzip all of your stupidly large text files
  • You could always do with a bigger computer
  • You will never win a drinking contest with your system administrator
  • Desk rejections seem to be a Friday thing