About This Blog

I write on this blog about things I find interesting. It’s fine if they’re not interesting to you. This blog is a means for clearing my head of ideas, organizing my thoughts, recording things I want to remember, and practicing my writing skills. I am slowly converting items from my journal into back-dated blog posts, and I revise frequently.

I do not use AI for writing, but I do have a single post so far that includes an AI-generated image.

This blog is created using the Jekyll static site generator. The blog site uses no cookies or other tracking mechanisms, and I have not provided a mechanism for comments.

Feel free to contact me by email by clicking on the envelope icon at the bottom left of this page.

About Conrad Halling

Me with my Surly Disc Trucker on the Minuteman Bikeway

My activities in retirement include learning cello and guitar; running; bicycle touring; and dog walking—so much dog walking. I enjoy reading fiction and nonfiction and listening to audiobooks, podcasts, and music.

On the science and computing side, my activities include astronomy, computers, computer programming, dabbling in data science and machine learning, and reading about science.

Education

I earned B.A. degrees in chemistry (1979) and biology (1982) at Portland State University and a Ph.D. in molecular biology (1989) at the University of California, Berkeley. I was an American Cancer Society post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago (May 1989 - August 1993).

Employment History

I worked in the biotechnology industry for 28+ years (November 1993 through February 2022). I filled various roles, often concurrently, including bioinformatics scientist, project manager, data manager, data analyst, web developer, database administrator, Linux administrator, grant writer, hiring manager, consultant, and team lead.

From 2006-2022, I was a member of a team that created tools for designing protein expression constructs; managing DNA and protein samples; and collecting, presenting, and interpreting protein assay data.

My career was challenging and rewarding, and I miss working collaboratively to solve hard research problems.

Technical Skills

Given my domain expertise in molecular biology—having worked at the laboratory bench for ten years during my graduate school and post-doctoral research—I applied my experience and knowledge towards writing computational tools for molecular biologists.

I used many programming languages over the years, including (in approximate chronological order) C, Fortran, Oracle SQL, Perl, HTML, CSS, R, C++, PHP, bash, MySQL, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, and SQLite. I also used tools such as CVS, SVN, Git, JIRA, and Slack. I was still writing code using Python, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, and CSS when I retired at age 67 years 6 months at the end of February 2022.