With my blog posts, I wish to bring to light learnings that are often overlooked in publications, discussing the topics of data analysis, modeling, and coding. We usually experiment with various methodological approaches, and it’s the successful ones that make it to the final publication. However, understanding what doesn’t work and why certain approaches outperform others is crucial when planning new analyses. I hope that this blog can guide you through the shadowy realm of failed analyses and hidden best practices.

The nature of this blog

The insights shared here are more like friendly anecdotes than formal scientific observations. So, think of this blog as a casual chat in a hallway, rather than a scientific manuscript. Extensive benchmarks are undoubtedly valuable, but they are out of scope for me. If you want to test things out more rigorously, I am sure you could even make a nice paper out of it. So feel free to use the here-discussed ideas as an inspiration.

Audience

This blog can be of interest to anyone with applied computational background. While the data we use differs, the ways we approach different challenges can be translated across domains. Since I come from a computational single-cell biology background, my early posts may be biased in this direction. However, in the future, I plan to cover a wide variety of topics relevant to data analysts and method developers across different data domains.

Note: If you feel that some of my posts lack explanations, please let me know so that I can adjust the content of future posts.

Updates on new posts

Since this blog is just a hobby of mine, the posts will probably be published only every two or three months.

I will announce new posts on LinkedIn and possibly Bluesky and Twitter.

Contact

If you want to contact me regarding the blog, LinkedIn is the preferred communication channel. While I have accounts on some other platforms, I do not regularly use them and will likely miss any messages there.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for past support from Joachim Herz Stiftung via Add-on Fellowships for Interdisciplinary Life Science that sponsored some of my illustration tools.

Disclaimers

Some of my graphic are designed with the help of AI Generate Vectors tool. All graphics were hitherto manually adjusted.