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First blog post, added theming
Coffee-themed, font changes and a first post.
2026-10-04 17:35:06 +02:00

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---
title: Starting a blog
date: 2026-10-04
---
Hi there! This is my first post in hopefully many. I'm Pascal and work as a bioinformatician in the field of metabolomics. I studied bioinformatics, getting my master degree in 2020 at the University of Amsterdam and since then I work at the Metabolomics Analytical Centre, which is part of the University of Leiden. Here I develop software to support the data analysis of large volumes of samples. This however, remains a challenge for reasons that hopefully become clear through posts on this blog. Ofcourse, I will also attempt to provide solutions for practical challenges I've encounted.
I decided to start this blog to share my experience with data analysis in metabolomics as publishing articles is a slow process, and might not be the right platform for sharing everyday encounters. I've been enjoying reading other blogs like [yet another metabolomics club](https://metabolomics.blog) & [Notes from a data witch](https://blog.djnavarro.net), and it seemed the right fit to share my thoughts, ideas and code snippets. I'll post those to my [git](https://git.pascal-maas.nl/explore/repos). Except to see code mostly written in R, Python and perhaps some C++.
In the office I'm known for drinking way too much coffee (although I don't see anything wrong with my consumption..). For this reason I called the light/dark mode after coffee drinks and themed the blog as such. I'm genuinely curious how big the caffeine spike would be on our LC-MS systems, but since the assay uses plasma it will remain a mystery to this day. Perhaps DBS based metabolomics would be my best bet..
Anyways, enjoy your stay!
*[bioinformatics]: An interdisciplinary field of science that develops computational methods and software tools for understanding biological data
*[DBS]: Dried Blood Spots, a promising, minimally invasive techninique for blood sampling.