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bli
  • Member for 11 years, 2 months
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About

I'm a bioinformatician with a background in evolutionary biology (mostly phylogeny).

I've always been interested in computers and programming. Here are some landmarks:

  • In primary school, I enjoyed the (few) times where we got to learn some Logo and draw things on the screen with the turtle.

  • As a teenager, I wrote my first program in Turbo Pascal in the mid 1990's (on a Mac Classic II on which I also played Shufflepuck, Sim Life and Civilization).

  • I later did a small simulation project (still in Turbo Pascal) as part of a biology subject in the year 2000. (My biology teacher was also into programming and encouraged me to do so, although it was usually expected to have a wet lab project rather than have it in-silico.)

  • I learned how to use e-mail and the internet in the UNIX computer rooms of my university in the early 2000's, where I learned a few basics in command-line, met hackers and got a first contact with a part of their culture, including reading the Usenet news and playing text-mode roguelike games (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a great game).

  • I installed my first GNU/Linux distribution in 2004: Debian on a iMac G3, lots of other UNIX distributions were soon tested on this machine, including Darwin, OpenBSD and Gentoo. The most tricky part in these adventures usually was getting the French Mac keyboard to be usable.

  • I learned the basics of Python during my PhD, to automate a method involving the comparison of phylogenetic trees.

  • I bought a Thinkpad T61 in 2008, which I still use as of 2018, and that runs under Funtoo Linux.

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