Hello Bioinformatics lovers,

This is Tommy. My 2-year-old Anna was begging me to read Peppa Pig stories to her. It is a little late for today's newsletter.

Today, we are going to talk about my #1 tip for bioinformatics job seekers:

Build your own website!

Why?

If people can not find you online, you do not exist.

According to Yihui Xie, the author of Rmarkdown and many other awesome tools:

You can include many other things that are not on your CV, such as invited talks and blog posts.

Blog posts are a great way to showcase your skills. You write R/python code to solve a practical problem.

It is much better than a line on your CV "I am good at python/R".

It takes time to start a blog. My advice is to START NOW!!

I have been writing blog posts for over 10 years. The best time to start was 10 years ago, the second best time is "right now".

I want to shout out to Namthip, a reader of my newsletter. She heard my advice and TOOK ACTION.

This is her blog link https://kuchikinamthip.github.io/​

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She writes blog posts on:

• screen command after watching my video https://kuchikinamthip.github.io/blog/2024/CompUnix1_Screen/​
• her computational biology workbench with R and docker https://kuchikinamthip.github.io/blog/2024/Comp4_R/​

and many other awesome stuff.

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It takes time to learn any skills. But you see after 2 years, Namthip has achieved a lot!

Tools to build your website:

• You can use github page https://pages.github.com/​
• I have been using Blogdown for my website. or the more recent Quarto https://quarto.org/docs/websites/​
• If you prefer a simple one-page website, use postcards https://github.com/seankross/postcards​
• If you do not want to write code, use something like Wix and WordPress.

The idea is simple:

Be visible online!

I have advised this to many people.

Do you know who makes the difference? People who take action and do it!

I am rooting for your success.

Happy Learning!

Tommy aka crazyhottommy

PS:

If you want to learn Bioinformatics, there are three ways that I can help:

1. My free YouTube Chatomics channel, make sure you subscribe to it.
2. I have many resources collected on my github here.
3. I have been writing blog posts for over 10 years https://divingintogeneticsandgenomics.com/​

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Stay awesome!