Show HN: An Article About How I Starting Programming

https://artificesoftware.com/articles/how_i_started_programming.html

1 5 4 months ago

This is an article I wrote recently about how I started as a volunteer programmer and how it progressed into a hobby and a career. I made this website and wanted to show it off. Thanks for any comments.

vunderba3• 4 months ago

Nice article.

This professor was collecting DNA from the archaeological site, sending it to a lab to be analyzed, and then was receiving the genetic sequences back listed as characters in a digital file (called a FASTQ file). In order to find out what organisms these sequences belonged to they needed to be input into a database to retrieve accession codes.

I did some bioinformatics work back in uni parallelizing the inside-outside algorithm using C and OpenMP for long runs on Solaris machines related to adjusting the weights on a DNA sequence model. Quite fun work.

Small bit of feedback: the font size you're using for the article is absolutely leviathan at 24px on a full desktop browser. The standard recommendation is usually 16-18px.

ArtificeAccount2• 4 months ago

Thank you for the feedback. Would you say the gigantic font is distracting? I have yet to add a proper mobile style, so it's even larger if you're reading on a phone, lol.

Are you doing similar work now? I haven't returned to anything bioinformatics related, though I do miss it.

vunderba3• 4 months ago

Would you say the gigantic font is distracting?

The funny thing is that I have Firefox set to default to 80% of the regular font size and my first thought was, "This article is using a large font size" - and then when I cranked it back up to what a normal person would see, it got kind of out of hand.

I personally use 18px for both desktop/mobile on my blog to keep things consistent and find that it strikes a pretty good balance.

I do like the font choice though - Montserrat is a solid choice for the web.

Are you doing similar work now?

Unfortunately it's been ages since I worked in the bioinformatics space - I'd love to go back to it in an academic capacity at some point though!

Show HN: An Article About How I Starting Programming

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