This post is more of an article type which is supposed to distill and simplify, and present some basic information on how the field of bioinformatics supports medicinal drug development and other biological research. For me it is a very interesting field as I am formally educated in both Computer Science and Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. Having deep fundamental understandings of both fields (although of course I could understand it even better) really makes it practical when you for instance need to compile or modify the source code of a program, when all you really wanna do is play around with a 3D model of a protein.
I noticed this first hand today while I was writing this article and I wanted to include some graphics made in PyMOL, and I realized that since I'm not a student anymore, I can't use the educational license given to me by the University for the binaries that the PyMOL guys provide, however, if you compile the PyMOL open source project from source yourself, you don't need a license! So great. I mean, compiling anything from source at all isn't really that difficult if all the dependencies are in a readily available repository, but I think most people wouldn't even think to look in their respective readily available repositories because sometimes you need to understand something quite well before you understand how simple it really is.
Anyways, I wrote it in Latex and compiled it into a nice little PDF so please follow the link below, it wouldn't look as nice in blog format.
https://www.simernes.com/docs/basics-of-bioinformatics-in-medicine.pdf