2020 is here and one of my goals for the coming year is to finally get caught up on the XKCD comic series. Starting from the beginning is a dull way of doing things so instead I've taken advantage of Google Cloud Platform's Cloud Scheduler to setup a python script to email me a random selection of new comics each day. In this post I will share how you can do the same.

After yesterday's post drawing Christmas trees with Python, it's time to give R a chance to shine. In this post, I use the shiny and ggvis packages to build a webapp for generating parametric snowflakes.

Christmas is here but that's no excuse to stop coding. In the second installment of the bank holiday bodge series, there will be a major change in format but the principle will stay the same—showcasing a rough piece of work brought to fruition in a single day. This post will concern the use of parametric equations and the animation module from matplotlib to generate your own ornamented Christmas tree animation

Don't waste your tin foil wrapping up your turkey when fashioning it into a hat is far more in need this Christmas. In this post I will reveal how advent calendar makers the world over, have been lying to you about. So launch your VPN and delete your cookies, we're about to take down Big Advent.

Reinforcement learning is a current hot topic in the world of data science. In this post, we look at how concepts from this area, in particular effective policies for the multi-armed bandit problem, can be applied to a job application assessment ran by pymetrics.

ggplot2 is an amazing tool for building beautiful visualisations using a simple and coherent grammar—that is, when it wants to play nice. Sadly, this is not always the case and one can find themselves developing strange workarounds to overcome the limitations of the package. This post discusses one of these approaches, used to facilitate the correct ordering of factors within a faceted plot.

When we get swept up by the data science craze, it is often all too easy to forget the importance of pure mathematics and statistics, in place of flashy new algorithms and machine learning models. As a reminder of the power of pure mathematics, this post discusses how I used a moderate knowledge of combinatorics to solve a challenging ProjectEuler+ problem with only 4 essential lines of code.

Sorting algorithms are an essential part of a computer scientist's toolbox. They are so integral to the field that there are almost endless visualisations of the algorithms at work. I've decide to jump on the band wagon and make my own contribution. In this post I discuss my visualisation method and showcase its application on a few simple sorting algorithms, explaining how such processes work in the meantime.

Shiny is an incredibly tool for building online dashboards and web apps. The crux of Shiny is the concept reactive programming, allowing you to build visualisations and analyses which automatically update with changing user input. Reactivity is complicated though and doesn't always work as you expect so in this post I tackle an issue which I have repeatedly faced in my work and to which a solution I am yet to find online.

In the first installment of this new blog post series, I will be discussing my summer internship working at the global customer data science firm, dunnhumby. In doing so, I will discuss the elements that tasks up my work, the challenges I faced in completing them, and the lessons I learnt in the process.