Show HN: An Article About How I Starting Programming
artificesoftware.comThis 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. 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. 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. > 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! Same, there's something magical about using computers to look at genes. And thanks for your honest review. I took a look at your blog and spent some time playing the Aladdin game, I liked that it got comically fast. One thing I really loved on your site is the changing profile picture every time you scroll away, that's a fun touch. Thanks! I'm a huge fan of easter eggs so I try to put them in everything I develop. Glad you enjoyed the Aladdin game - I wanted to make a full version of it and release it properly on the Apple Store but didn't particularly feel like getting sued into oblivion by Disney. > The name was never changed because the "Actually Two Different Old Vero Women Ice Age site" was just too much. I forgot to mention - font size aside I really enjoyed the article. This line cracked me up. Gave me flashes of "Three boys in a trenchcoat" paleolithic exhibit / little rascals vibes.