Bioinformatics Zen

20% time. Ever heard of it? It’s also called Independent Developer Projects. In a nutshell, if you’re lucky enough to work for Google, apart from all the free food, giant colored balls and Californian weather, you get to spend 20% of your time working on whatever excites you. Related to Google’s aims of course, I doubt you can sit at your desk all day painting bananas red. The blurb on Google Jobs states that Google News, Suggest and Orkut all began as 20% time projects. This blog post is an example

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I wrote previously about using the file system to organise your scripts and data. I use this method and it does help my organisation, but it doesn’t replace a lab book. I want a system that explains the relationships between the different set of results, and shows the outline of my work.

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Previously, I wrote about organising your file system to make the relationships between files that produce data, and files containing data more descriptive. One of the best tips I’ve been given, is to store all my data in a database. Regardless of what the data is, or how “mission critical”. Here are some reasons to use a database, rather than files, to store your data.

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Browsing wikiomics, I found this small section on keeping organised as a practising bioinformatician. In particular these lines contain gems of information.

• Use text files/plain e-mail whenever possible
• Give meaningful names to your files
• Create separate folders/directories for each project with meaningful names

I find keeping my work organised one of the most frustrating but necessary tasks of being a bioinformatician. Also this subject seems to recieve little attention in the bioinformatics community.

Wet scientists are expected to keep laboratory books. Where not doing so considered very bad practice. I am jealous when I see these books filled with pictures of gels and printed tables of results. I’ve tried using a lab book, but I didn’t find it applicable for the many different types of scripts and results I was producing.

Here are some tips I find useful for organising myself.

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