It all began with a piece of code.... 💻

My journey to where I am today, all began about four years ago! As I am writing this, I can't believe that I'm here right now, from the time where I thought code used to be written on a browser! Talk about growth.

So why bioinformatics? Well let's turn back the time to four years ago when I had a programming unit in school. So when I was still a student at JKUAT, partaking my Bsc in Genomics, I had a unit in C language. I think I was around second year back then. Now today at least I know we were learning C, back then I didn't understand what all this mumbo jumbo was! 😩😩

Now we had this lecturer, who believe it or not, taught us code without ever mentioning the IDEs, editors, what this code is used for, the only thing, ONLY, I got from the whole semester was stdio.h and I never got to know what it was used for!

Back at home, while trying to revise for our coming exams, I never knew where this code thingy was written on. Is it word? Google? I tried writing the whole code on Google and yeah, you can only imagine what happened from there ...

Anyways, that was the first trigger to get me started on my tech journey. During quarantine I just decided to just learn what tech was all about, and I actually started with Python! Before branching off to HTML CSS for a while, returning back to python, getting obsessed with cloud, and here we are.

So bioinformatics is a buffer between two worlds of mine; Genomics and technology. Imagine a multi-disciplinary unit touching on biology, technology, big data, research.. so much! With bioinformatics I never have to choose which side to go to; Cyndie the scientist, or Cyndie the tech nerdie. I got to be both! That's exactly where I had to be.

It's now my second day as a Bioinformatics intern at ICIPE, and it feels like home. I already know that I'll be venturing on the computational and infrastructure side of Bioinformatics, so that means dealing with database management, developing algorithms using Python, creating pipelines and workflows, dealing with containers, I'm very ready for it!

My vision? Become so good at computational and infrastructural bioinformatics I can design systems, manage databases very comfortably. Develop algorithms used to analyse biological data. Become not just a developer, but a systems engineer as well. And having a security- first mindset, eventually secure these systems, to ensure my fellow bioinformaticians have a seamless work experience. Well someone's got to be at the back-end no? 🥰 🥰 So.. To Infinity And Beyond! 💪