My 15 practical tips for a bioinformatician

This article is originally published at http://onetipperday.sterding.com/

1. Always set a seed number when you run tools with random option, e.g. bedtools shuffle, random etc.; You (or your boss in a day) want your work reproducible. 
2. Set your own temporary folder (via --tmp, $TMPDIR etc., depending on your program). By default, many tools, e.g. sort, use the system /tmp as temporary folder, which may have limited quote that is not enough for your big NGS data. 
3. Always use a valid name for your variables, column and rows of data frame. Otherwise, it can bring up unexpected problem, e.g. a '-' in the name will be transferred to '.' in R unless you specify check.names=F.
4. Always make a README file for the folder of your data; For why and how, read this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2304863/how-to-write-a-good-readme
5. Always comment your code properly, for yourself and for others, as you very likely will read your ugly code again.
6. Always backup your code timely, using github, svn, Time Machine, or simply copy/paste whatever.
7. Always clean up the intermediate or unnecessary data, as you can easily shock your boss and yourself by generating so much data (and perhaps most of them are useless). 
8. Don't save into *.sam if you can use *.bam. Always zip your fastq (and other large plain files) as much as you. This applies to other file format if you can use the compressed one. As you cannot imagine how much data (aka "digital garbage") you will generate soon.
9. Using parallel as much as you can, e.g. using "LC_ALL=C sort --parallel=24 --buffer-size=5G" for sorting (https://www.biostars.org/p/66927/), as multi-core CPU/GPU is common nowaday.
10. When a project is completed, remember to clean up your project folder, incl. removing the unnecessary code/data/intermediate files, and burn a CD or host it somewhere in cloud for the project. You never know when you, your boss or your collaborators will need the data again;
11. Make your code sustainable as possible as you can. Remember the 3 major features of OOP: Inheritance, Encapsulation, Polymorphism. (URL)
12. When you learn some tips from others by Google search, remember to list the URL for future reference and also for acknowledging others' credit. This applies to this post, of course :)
13. Keep learning, otherwise you will be out soon. Just like the rapid development of NGS techniques, computing skills are also evolving quickly. Always catch up with the new skills/tools/techniques.
14. When you learn some tips from others, remember to share something you learned to the community as well, as that's how the community grows healthily. 
15. Last but not least, stand up and move around after sitting for 1-2 hours. This is especially important for us bioinformaticians who usually sit in front of computer for hours. Only good health can last your career long. More reading: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/02/medical-researchers-have-figured-out-how-much-time-is-okay-to-spend-sitting-each-day/

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This article is originally published at http://onetipperday.sterding.com/
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