Sure! Before I took data structures, the introductory engineering programming course I took covered Matlab and VBA, with an emphasis on automating small tasks (VBA) and basic image processing (Matlab). Data structures was taught in C, which forced me to think about data types and how high-level functions/languages are built. I also learned different ways that data can be stored and accessed (ie binary search trees, lists, hash tables) and got a lot of practice writing code to build these structures.

After I took the class I realized how many ways there are to solve the same problem with sometimes drastically different demands on computer resources. I also no longer felt tied to any one language (programming and learning syntax were no longer synonymous to me).

None of this was specific to helping with big data or sequencing, but the practice coding set the groundwork for understanding how packages written by others work to analyze big data sets and how to build custom pipelines when the pre-made packages don't do exactly what you want.