That's a very poor representation of bioinformatics. There's certainly a lot of data munging and cleaning (like in any field with lots of data), but bioinformat

That's a very poor representation of bioinformatics. There's certainly a lot of data munging and cleaning (like in any field with lots of data), but bioinformatics/computational biology is not about dumb pattern matching or just writing code. Biologists can code just fine (I got a job at Facebook off a PhD in computational biology). It's all about data mining and machine learning on biological data, to gain real insight about the functioning of an organism, often then doing the experiments to test that insight. I've seen lots of computer scientists and programmers jump in and flounder, because they're under the misconception that all it takes is the application of canned algorithms to a new data set. You need to understand biology (genomics, molecular biology, genetics, structural biology), first and foremost. Then you need to understand a significant amount of statistics, information theory, and computer science. This isn't meant to discourage you, but you're not going to get far beyond doing more web programming for biology websites if you don't teach yourself some of these areas.