I picked up the R programming language during my MSc at University of California San Diego, and use it constantly in my day-job, along with some Python. For fun I sometimes apply these tools to interesting-looking datasets that are lying around the web, and try to tell their stories through well-designed data visualisations. Some blog posts are mirrored on R-bloggers, a blogging community for the R language.
Useful bash one-liners useful for bioinformatics (and some, more generally useful).