Welcome to Mario R. Blanco's blog

I will be using this page to document my experiences navigating new datasets, code, and languages as I begin to volunteer at HackforLA. The COVID19 pandemic has further highlighted to me the large inequalities that exist in society and in particular here in LA. Being faced with this reality I was inspired to donate some of my time to HackforLA due to their involvement in a variety of projects that are focused on addressing these inequalities and providing real working solutions to begin solving them.

Date: August 16, 2020

Today I have been exploring using Github pages to help create this blog post. One of my personal goals when I decided to join HackforLA was to become more proficient in using Github. Github has become more integrated in the academic world of the biological sciences because it allows for the rapid distribution of code to perform analysis. I believe that it will become a more prominent component of the publication process as journals and fields try to make data analysis and results more reproducible. To generate this blog post I followed the instructions provided by [GithubPages](https://guides.github.com/features/pages/). I followed the link to this [Mastering Markdown](https://guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown) site to begin getting more familiar with the Markdown syntax and incorporating it into this blog post.