I know that from the outside, ‘science’ seems like The Place Where Scientists Live. But ‘science’ is not a monolithic, homogenous thing. Not all scientists are the same.

Today someone called me a Biologist. But I was never really a Biologist. My undergraduate degree was in a chemistry department.

My past life as a researcher was always very interdisciplinary. To better understand cancer cells, I used a lot of sophisticated software, and mathematical intuition, in addition to chemistry and physics.

I spent about a year learning Python when I first got back into coding. A lot of people have asked me where to begin. Here’s a guide to what I found useful (or not) and why.

1. Learn Python The Hard Way by Zed Shaw.

I started here. I did the free online version.

I like the advice he gives you to just type things in, even if you don’t know what’s happening yet. This required a bit of an adjustment to my usual mindset, where I question everything all the time.

A lot of people have asked me why I’m not working in academia or biotech, how I learned to code, or how I got into data science. Here are some answers to some of those questions.

Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be in academia?

Yes and no.

Yes, I wanted my own lab. No, we don’t always get what we want, even after 7 years of postdoc.

Long story short: bad timing. It wasn’t bad enough that my thesis advisor had some personal and professional crises while I was his first grad student, but one of our lab members committed suicide on September 10th, 2001. I graduated the following year. Then my first postdoc advisor died. Plenty of other things went wrong, but at the end of all that, in spite having published some papers, I still couldn’t get a faculty position.