They are good questions, though a little overwhelming all at once, especially since I am still at the "clone anything into L. acidophilus" stage of things. :) I'd love it if heat shock worked reliably with Gram-positive bacteria, but it is definitely not the best way of going about it; electroporation is the gold standard, and I don't have an electroporator yet. I'm building one, though. The logic to control it works great, and I have the low-voltage side optoisolated from the high-voltage side, but I'm still working the kinks out of getting the HV circuit to activate from a mere 5V in. There's a whole lot of stuff I've had to learn and am still learning, but it sure is fun!

Fundamentally I really am a software developer at heart, and a test-driven developer at that. I work by figuring out what I want a particular step of my work to do, figuring out how I'll verify that I've achieved what I wanted, then implementing and debugging till the tests succeed. It is a bit slow and plodding, but ultimately rewarding.