C’è chi dice No [Italian]

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Molti anni fa, all’indomani del 27 marzo 1994, quando questo paese scellerato compì un decisivo passo verso il ritorno alla barbarie, su Cuore, storico, come si definiva, “Settimanale di Resistenza Umana”, ambizione più che mai attuale, lessi un’analisi che più o meno era come segue.

Al di là di spostamenti di pochi punti, gli italiani sono sempre quelli: da un lato i reazionari, gli evasori, gli opportunisti, gli ignoranti, dall’altro i democratici, gli antifascisti, chi cerca di informarsi e chi pensa anche agli altri. Li puoi spostare un po’ da una parte o dall’altra, ma fondamentalmente sempre quelli sono…

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Life has exceptions, and Web Applications are no Exception

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Joke on Exceptions

When you develop software, you should handle abnormal events, aka, errors and exceptions, the proper way. If you ignore that, you’ll end up with your users seeing ugly messages, or even blank screens, or you (or other developers) not having important diagnostic details. Here, I’ll talk about a common situation I see when developing web applications: the client code trying to process API requests that failed (ie, `HTTP Status != 20x`) as if nothing bad happened. In most cases, this causes the further complication that CORS-related errors confusingly appear on the browser, hiding the actual problem.

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Making Data Deeply FAIR through Lightweight Standards, the KnetMiner and ELIXIR Cases

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This is an update about the AgriSchemas project (mostly), which I gave today to the ELIXIR Plant Science community. Despite we are busy with many other tasks at KnetMiner, we have done quite a deal of work with representing knowledge graphs using what I call "lightweight schemas", that is BioSchemas, schema.org, Dublin Core and the […]

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So, what’s bioinformatics about?

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This post was inspired by one of my students. As it happens, it started with a few questions in a chat, which were essentially like: since you’re a senior in this field (ie, I’m getting old, personal note…), I’d like to ask you some advice on what job is best, should I do a PhD, what are the other options (education, training, etc) to work as a bioinformatician, what about salaries, success chances, challenges, etc, etc.

After having had to delay a well-thought and comprehensive answer, I decided that maybe it was worth organising my notes on the not-so-easy topic and writing a public post, so that it could benefit everyone.

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A Few Notes on (my) Code Style

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programming-experience

Recently, in my team, we have managed to start periodic talks/discussions on software engineering, including best practices, project management tools, code style, testing and all that jazz. If you are in a large-enough team in a full software house, probably you’re thinking: well, this kind of meetings should be pretty standard in this business. Well, […]

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