nodalpoint.org

refactoremycode.com is another new web 2.0 service, this time aimed at helping programmers at receiving comments and feedback to enhance their code.

It works in this way: you are unsure about a portion of your code, or a library you are writing; so, you can upload it to the refactoremycode repository, and the other people, driven by a 'web 2.0 - free software' philosophy, will have a look at it and give you their suggestions and comments and feedback.

Here is the link: http://refactormycode.com/

I am Ryan Castillo, currently a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University working on my M.S. degree in Bioinformatics. I received my undergraduate degree in Computer Science with a minor in Physics.

I am Bosco. I live in San Francisco. I research Science as a Postdoc studying Proteins.

A step-by-step guide to create Python applications in bioinformatics. A tutorial blog by Paulo Nuin, a bioinformatician, currently working at the Ontario Cancer Institute of the University Health Network in Toronto, Canada.

A blog by Andrew Perry, Australian postdoc.

A weblog by Fabrice Jossinet - Assistant Professor at University Louis Pasteur teaching bioinformatics.

Just when I though Bosco was posting too much poetry, he comes out with this truly excellent post on advice for young computational biologists. Bosco has managed to distill his 10 years of experience into eleven succinct points that are relevant to not only those just starting out in computational biology, but experienced hackers as well. This post is a must read, I highly recommend his advice in point four on using configuration files. It is a simple way of adding value to scripts, by extracting out the parameters into a config file and then writing another script to iterate over different values. Python has a default module for this, with many other third party options. And of course point eight, using command line plotting software, my current favorite is Ploticus.