Data Science

Tips for publishing your first document with bookdown and RStudio

I have just published my first document with bookdown and I am feeling euphoric at the moment. Somehow this gives me a very different satisfaction as compared to creating just a google document. Yes, they serve almost the same function, but the presentation of a bookdown document is much better. It also provides more functionalities and flexibilities than a google doc. Here are the minimal steps needed to customize a document from Yihui’s guide.

OPINION: Why plain text files shall prevail

This is an opinionated post on my belief how the future of text editing should be. I have been editing my CV recently. The purpose of a CV is to illustrate a person’s relevant professional experience in a field and basically to sell someone out. Since it is about selling, then some customization is required for each post to achieve the best impression. The basic content across all documents is likely to be similar or the same, but the sequence may need to be rearranged to highlight different expertise for different audience.

Utilisation of bioinformatics data

I am writing this post not as a guideline, but mainly for self-reference and hopefully a prompt for discussion. The boom of bioinformatics in recent years is coupled with cheaper technologies and consequently the surge of the amount of data available. The rapid development of the field itself is an anti-estblishment movement - even the most experienced bioinformaticians must spend a significant amount of time getting updated with the resources and toolkits.

Working with multi-thread machine

Compreesion tar cf - paths-to-archive | pigz -9 -p 32 > archive.tar.gz

A R package that creates blank Rmd files

I have created this package to create a blank Rmd file by saving a nearly blank Rmd template to the menu when you create Rmd files. I think it at least follows the first half of the UNIX orthodox: programs that do one thing and do it well. 😂 Reflection: the main purpose for me to create this package, other than making life easier, is to practise how to publish a R package onto github and to install it from there.

Git commands to live by

This is a collection of common git commands that I use very often in my daily work. I have only touched on GitHub and find it fairly sufficient for my needs, and thus this post will base on GitHub as well. Case 1: start a new repository Let’s say we want to upload ~/analysis/ to GitHub On GitHub: create a new repository The only things I will set here are the repository name and the choice whether it is public or private.

How to plot a bar plot with bars and labels between tick marks

I had this quesition when preparing my manuscript and a quick search brings me to this stackoverflow question by Johanna. I find the answer by Henrick to be highly effective, but can be further elaborated so that readers can be clearer about the functions of each line. Thus, I will base my post largely on Henrick’s answer but at the same time add my explanation to the rationale behind the lines.

hello world

Yes I have built this website. It is definitely not an easy process though. I can confirm this because by the time this post is being written, the website itself has not been deployed yet. Well but I just want to briefly explain the reasons why I am putting this website up. The most important reason is that I increasingly feel a need to host a place on the internet (not a typo) for me to outreach to other people.