DeLillo may not believe it, but I do. From the start of the interview:

"INTERVIEWER: Do you have any idea what made you a writer?

DON DeLillo: I have an idea but I’m not sure I believe it. Maybe I wanted to learn how to think. Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them."

Don't hate the player...Game on!

In a previous life, I became a scuba instructor that kept me in the latest dive gear. (This was along side working towards a Ph.D.)

Eventually it burned me out -- instructing is a stressful "service" gig; and it turned me off of diving for years. This is something that I've observed with other folks in "lifestyle" businesses, e.g., I know yoga and martial arts instructors that ultimately quit not only the instructing, but the hobby.

If you love something, be careful about teaching it!

How to ruin a great hobby: make it your job.

It'll help with re-sale (still 22 years to go!) - one likely outcome before you kick it.

"...keeps publishing biased articles about the drawbacks of doing a PhD"

I think that startups have a lot more interesting and important things to do than support or promote hit pieces on PhDs and academia life.

Bay area (Emeryville and East Bay are pretty interesting, in addition to South SF), and Research Triangle Park (North Carolina). Seattle a bit.

I built a little tool to audit objects in your R pipeline here:

https://jabustyerman.com/2017/09/29/auditing-your-r-data-pip...

This basically allows you to tag (wrap) intermediate functions in your pipe, and then inspect the objects generated by that function later.

Curious to know why you landed on snakemake for bioinformatics? Were you considering other workflow engines?

I settled on snakemake because my corner of bioinformatics had the most prepared 'recipes' for that one, plus it played nice with our cluster's weird local flavor of SLURM

Nice! Look into tufte style class for book layouts. It's particular and if you like that type of particular then you'll love it.