Good blogs to follow

Hello there!

I always thought that if you want to become good at something, it is essential to read as much information on the subject as possible. Constant reading helps you to stay on track with the current trends in research, improves your understanding skills, and may even inspire new ideas in you.

Today I would like to share with you a small collection of interesting chemoinformatics-related blogs which I have been following for quite a while, and have always found engaging and enlightening. In fact, these blogs (and their authors) inspired me to start my personal page, so I feel it is only natural that I share my sources of inspiration as the first note I post here.

I would like to stress that this is not a rating of any kind, so the referenced blogs are not listed in any particular order.

1. Is Life Worth Living?

   This is a very nice personal blog of Iwatobipen, a chemoinformatician / medicinal chemist working in a pharmaceutical company in Japan. Apart from the analysis of articles that sparked an interest in the author, there are also lots of programming-related posts, with detailed code examples for the discussed concepts or particular libraries.

2. Practical Chemoinformatics

   This blog is authored by Dr. Pat Walters, and offers a variety of posts on recent scientific articles and chemoinformatics software. What I like about this blog is the fact that the author gives his personal opinions on a variety of chemoinformatics-related subjects, which are always practical in one way or another, very original, and sometimes unexpected.

3. DrugDiscovery.net

   Authored by Dr. Andreas Bender, this blog is a good collection of posts that raise thought-provoking questions related to chemoinformatics basing on the author’s personal experience as a drug designer and a professional in the field. The blog also offers critical reviews of recent literature and lots of information about upcoming events, such as conferences or talks.

4. Cheminformania

   This blog is authored by Dr. Esben Jannik Bjerrum and provides handy information and practical examples of how to perform various cheminformatic tasks, with a focus on the application of deep learning techniques. There are also useful posts about the statistical interpretation of the modeling results, where the author shares his insight and advice regarding common pitfalls of modeling or results interpretation.

5. Chemoinformatics and Molecular Modeling

   This blog is created and actively maintained by Dr. Timur Madzhidov, and it is one of the largest chemoinformatics-related blogs in the Russian-speaking part of the Internet. The author writes short reviews of interesting papers he found to grab his attention, shares helpful chemoinformatics and programming resources, announces upcoming events of interest. The blog offers a large diversity in the covered themes, ranging from chemo- and bio-informatics to quantum chemistry and software engineering, covering many themes related to a day-to-day work of a chemoinformatician.

Thanks to these blogs and personal pages, I decided to start sharing my own experience as a beginner chemoinformatician in hopes that somebody on the Internet may find it useful. I will do my best to write in a clear and concise way on significant subjects, to make the posts both captivating and easy for you to read.

Thank you for your kind attention. See you in the next post.

Cheers!