Hi, howdy, bienvenue. Welcome to the first post on my new blog. I've always wanted to write a blog however never bothered to set one up. With the demise of Twitter (I still refuse to call it X) and no clear winner emerging out of Threads, Mastodon or BlueSky, I thought now would be the perfect oppurtunity to start blogging, at least until I figure out federation. I'll start with a little bit about myself personally and professionally, how I've set up the blog and then I'll set out what the sort of posts I want to write here.

About me

I currently work as an NHS Clinical Scientist in Bioinformatics in the North East and Yorkshire Genomics Laboratory Hub where I am based in the Sheffield Diagnostic Genetics Service (SDGS). I completed the Scientist Training Programme here, which I started in 2019, and I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here, however I have decided to leave this role due to frustrations with the lack of career progression oppurtunities in the NEY GLH for bioinformaticians. In April, I will be moving to Cardiff starting a new role as Lead Bioinformatician for the consitutional service, or what I know as "Rare Disease", for the All Wales Medical Genomics Service.

When I am not doing bioinformatics, I enjoy all the normal nerd things such as tinkering with electronics or software and playing video games, although I'm not really sure I enjoy the latter so much anymore, and I certainly don't have time for it anymore.

I live with my partner of 12 years and our 15 year old Springer Spaniel, Harvey. We are very lucky to live so close to the Peak District at the moment, so we can be often found walking Harvey around many of the beautiful areas on our doorstep.

The old boy himself

How I set this blog up

I set this blog up using the Zola static site generator. I am currently building and publishing this manually although I plan to automate this using GitHub actions or something similar. I quite like it so far, it's fast, the documentation is decent and the template syntax is enough like the Django or Jinja2 syntax which I am quite familiar with. I plan to provide an RSS feed soon.

What I am going to write about

I have a particular interest in the use of the Rust programming languge for bioinformatics, and would like to drive it's adoption in NHS Clinical Bioinformatics. One of the main goals of this blog is to share my experiences of using Rust in my work, why I think it's suitable for this work, and to also provide educational content on Rust for bioinformatics.

I also plan to share some write ups of some of the tinkering I have done with software and electronics. For example, replacing my toothbrush rechargeable battery or fixing my coffee scales such that it would charge with a USB-C to USB-C cable.

Hope to see you soon!