Third week

Hello lovely readers,

I know its been a while. I also know I'm about 4 days late with this post, but I've had a relatively busy weekend, so this kind of slipped my mind.

First things first though, so here's my report of week 3.

Truthfully, there is not a whole lot to tell. My experience with bioinformatics is that it takes a long time to do little work. When I think back to the work I've done on a day by day basis, I'm not all that impressed, since it's usually tweaking the code a little, or adding some UI elements. However, with all the testing and troubleshooting, those things that feel like they should only take a few minutes eat up a couple hours with ease.

Either way, I have integrated EdgeR into the application, though it doesn't work completely yet. Currently, the application calculates the normalized values (in CPM), the p-values, the fold change and logCPM. I need to do more testing, since I am not sure whether those last three are the correct values. I have also added in a download button for the generated RNAseq data. Clicking it lets you download the data in either a .tsv or .csv format. I wanted to autogenerate a title for the document, but I cannot get it to work.

I have also placed the two buttons into one row, which was a lot more trouble than I expected. For some reason the buttons refused to be placed right next to each other, one was always on a different row. I don't know how that happened, since I only added in 1 row. Eventually I tried a different approach. I created a table and placed the buttons inside of it, and that did work.

Lastly, I spent some time writing up a basic template for the front page of the application. As part of that process, I tried to come up with a decent name for the application, but I am rubbish at naming tools, characters or pets, so nothing good came out. I asked my supervisor for some input, but all he said was that he would like for the name to have "differential expression" included in it.

During the weekend I went back home to Belgium. I took the train at 5:30pm on Friday, and I arrived at 9:45pm that same day. Surprisingly, the journey went by faster than I thought it would. Perhaps it had something to do with me having to study on the train, which made it easy to lose track of time.

There are two reasons I went home. The first is that I have applied for a job in a laboratory, which required me to take a multiple choice test to test my knowledge. I wasn't sure what kind of knowledge it would test, so I refreshed some of the courses of the last few years. Turns out most of the questions were insight-based (eg: "In this situation, do you do A, B, C, D or E?") but a couple required me to calculate concentrations, or did test some basic medical knowledge. Most were questions that I feel are easier to answer if you've had some workplace experience.

The second reason would be family. It was Mother's day last Sunday, and my mum had asked me whether I would come home for the weekend. Now, I was glad that the day of my test was on Tuesday after Mother's day, so I asked for a couple days of leave from work. Since the train journey is on the longer side, I didn't want to go home for just 1 full day, and then have to leave again on Sunday evening, but with the leave granted to me so I could go take the test, I had 3 full days to spend in Belgium. That made the journey worth it, of course.

 And that's all for this week's post!

See you in the next post,

Tibbert