A. Intersecting Interests

2026-02-28

I am cutting it close but that's okay ahaha!

I thought that this was such a fun topic that I had to throw my hat into the ring. Even if it doesn't make the post. I am not sure if my website still works because I went through a catastrophic laptop failure last month. I still haven't gotten a replacement but my blog is on GitHub so hopefully this works from a different computer!

It does work! I need to recustomize it but it's good to go :)

Can you believe I got started with writing and coding with online forum boards with BBcode?? Just seeing what other people were doing to customize their posts and signatures was mind blowing. I just didn't realize that it was like baby's first HTML code equivalent. The same thing happened many years later with organized Google Sheets and the wizardry people got up to when they maintain community resources. I'm not going to out right say but iykyk CS-FR-DV.

This gave me a major leg up compared to other people apparently because I'm no coding whiz kid, but code doesn't scare me away compared to the average person. I even get boggled by it. What do you mean you don't know how to make negative numbers in Excel? I thought that was a basic function. It's like the xkcd comic, you may be one of 10,000 people to learn this fact today!

I loved seeing this sort of energy on a wider scale when it came to bioinformatics. This is the combination of computer sciences with biology. I never used command line and I was thrown into the deep end during my MSc, but it was a lot of fun trying to figure out solutions! It did feel like reinventing the wheel over and over again because I was teaching myself by reading through markdowns and ReadMes, but I think that's the spirit of the old internet. Learn by having a picture in your mind and just do it!

My biggest roadblock was how on earth do I download x, y, z program?? Wow there was so much reading even to accomplish that much. So many questions to whack-a-mole, what were the dependencies, do I have the right version of python, what is the command to compile it???

My journey was tarball downloads -> make installs -> pip3 -> conda/mambas/github clones

I am so grateful for conda/mambas they truly make downloading this so much easier. Thank you open source internet! Without you, I don't think I would have liked my MSc and thesis project even half as much as I do now.

My side tangent is that I love jumping into rabbit holes and I think that's what led me to do a MSc in the first place. As a kid, I've visited numerous apothecaries with medicinal plants lined wall to wall, I even drank some of the teas. Flash forward to the medicinal plant biochemistry course in my last year of undergrad. I liked it so much, I decided to approach the professor to enquire about summer lab work. Badabing, badaboom, a few years later as a medicinal plant biology researcher I can say that I have scientifically contributed to the genetic understanding of peyote (when I get the paper published), the cacti that is responsible for psychedelic experiences for thousands of years.

Talking about intersecting interests though, I do think some Nominative Determinism was at play here to lead me down the plant research route. This is when people end up in jobs that fit their names. I didn't realize there was a phrase for it but I was listening to the Ologies podcast by Alie Ward where they interview people with interesting jobs. Dr. Faith Burden is an Asinologist or Donkey scholar. Apparently donkeys were heavily featured in religious texts, but even more they are known as Beasts of Burden. It was fate for her!

My Chinese name is 愛華, "Aihua", the first character is love, but the second can take many meanings. Commonly, it can be Splendid/Prosperous/China. "Hua" is a sort of homonym for flower 花 in Mandarin. 華 is even written as 华 in simplified Chinese. That is to say, my name can be interpreted as Love of the Flowering Land. Now isn't that a cool name for a plant biochemist?