Hello Bioinformatics lovers,

Tommy here. I thought Boston skipped Spring and ran into Summer last week.

It suddenly became chilly again this week..

It is already May!

But nothing is colder than "You figure it out yourself" when..

I asked a senior labmate for help when I started bioinformatics.​
They refused to share their script. Like it was gold.
That stung.

I was new. Drowning in FASTQ files. Bash was foreign.​
They had the solution. But all I got was:
“Figure it out yourself.”

That wasn’t mentoring.​
That was gatekeeping.
And sadly, it’s still common in academia.
Scripts hoarded like secrets.

Competition over collaboration.​
That mindset slows science.
It poisons labs.
It crushes the curious before they get a chance.

So I learned the hard way.​
Stack Overflow. Biostars. Endless trial and error.
One broken bash loop at a time.

And I promised myself:​
If I ever figured this out, I’d never do what they did.
I’d share everything.

Now I post scripts on GitHub.​
Write blog tutorials with working code.
Explain the why, not just the how.

Want to see an example?
I finally finished the last YouTube video for the ChIP-seq tutorial

​Nine videos plus step-by-step code (make sure you subscribe!):
​https://crazyhottommy.github.io/reproduce_genomics_paper_figures/​

Now we have AI.​
ChatGPT can write bash loops in seconds.
But AI isn’t magic.
You still need to think.

Trust, but verify.​
AI can write your code.
But only you can make sure it makes biological sense.

Here’s the truth:​
The scripts don’t matter.
What matters is how we treat each other in science.
How we share.

Because someone out there is where I once was.​
New. Lost. Eager.
And what they need isn’t silence.
It’s help.

Takeaways:

• Share your scripts
• Document them well
• Use AI, but sanity-check your output
• Choose kindness over ego

Don’t be the person who hoards knowledge.​
Be the person you needed when you were starting out.
Science moves faster when we move together.

Do you have a similar story? Hit reply and let me know. Or forward this to someone who just started in bioinformatics.

Let’s build something better—together.

Other posts from last week that you may find helpful

1. ​Write R functions with ... for additional arguments.
2. Human errors make bioinformatics data messy. Be careful!
3. ​Unix tricks to navigate through the Linux system. Do you know cd - ?
4. ​5 tools to visualize genomic datasets 🧵 ​
5. Data visualization is a critical step in data analysis. 8 links to bookmark for better data visualization:🧵
6. If you're a bioinformatician and think "protein abundance = protein function"… You're wrong.​
7. Bioinformatics is more about biology + informatics. It’s about formats. And pain.
8. ​8 links to BETTER understand principal component analysis (PCA) 🧵 👇
9. You don’t become a bioinformatician by solving problems. You become one by surviving the tools.
10. Analyzing any antibody depedent bioinformatics data? ChIP-seq, CITE-seq. make sure your antibodies are specific!

Happy Learning!

Tommy aka crazyhottommy

PS:

If you want to learn Bioinformatics, there are other 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/​

Stay awesome!