💻 I started coding just because my finger pained

 

I had to analyze data from 96- or 384-well plates — each exported as a CSV file with thousands of rows.

Sounds familiar? Yes! 96 or 384 wells — the well plates from the wet lab.

My data came from 2D cell culture imaging, where I had to analyze single-cell information.

I opened each file, searched for specific values, and repeated the same thing again and again.

What I faced were:

- Finger pain 😂

- Human weakness → human error after half a day of doing this

- Forgetting to save → all work gone

- Changing cut-offs → meant redoing everything from the start (and you know how often supervisors change them!)

I realized all of this was just repetition. I knew every step — I just had to do it again for every well (or many plates).

So I told my supervisor I wanted to use coding/programming to automate it.

His answer? No. He wanted me to do it manually — “by eyes” — to get results faster.

But I believed I could do more. So I decided to learn coding (R) secretly.

I didn’t tell him — I just kept maintaining all the usual lab work, while learning programming on my own.

It wasn’t easy. It took months of effort, but I had a goal:

to make my research more efficient and reproducible.

After some fast and furious learning, I wrote my own code, fixed bugs, and validated that it worked the same as manual analysis.

The result? No human error, finished in a minute, and I could change the cut-off anytime by typing a new number. Beautiful!

I finally applied it to other experiments too.

My supervisor was impressed — finally! 😆

A hidden benefit of programming is that it does what you already do — just faster and more accurately.

If you’re curious how coding can help you, start by asking:

💡 “Which task repeats until my fingers hurt?”

If you can answer that, you already have your first step into coding.

🧬 Here’s my project about this: Phenomics – High-Throughput Imaging (https://lnkd.in/gX5nKNRp)

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