Life Beyond Fife

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Follies

Explore articles about follies on Life Beyond Fife

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How I became a data scientist

During the #firstsevenjobs trend on Twitter, I tweeted my rather standard career path into software. It piqued the curiosity of a friend and former colleague who was interested in my minor blip as a data scientist - it was a surprising and short six month period in my career and fairly recent. Here's my story about why, and how I became a data scientist, and more importantly, some lessons on why it didn't work out. history of me Before launching straight into recent history, I'll briefly cover my early career where I was a computer scientist researcher. Growing up I...

11 min readRead more →
Yo dawg, I heard you like functions
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Yo dawg, I heard you like functions

It's hopefully old news to you all but the free lunch is over (NB this article is 10 years old). TL;DR – as we come up against the physical limits of how small transistors can be future computation gains will come from more processors, not faster processors. We can already see this looking at the number of cores we have available in development standard laptops. Writing code that can distribute its workload across multiple cores will only become more important as time goes on. As we move more and more services to AWS ensuring we get the most value for...

9 min readRead more →
A git workflow for beginners
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A git workflow for beginners

The web is awash with introductions and guides to using git. There's this visual guide here, that interactive tutorial there, reams of documentation, and of course all kinds of troubleshooting help. But if you're coming from a traditional Version Control System (SVN, Perforce, Clearcase etc.) the main barrier to using git is not answering the question, "How to I checkout and commit code changes?", but rather, "How do I use all these complex features to develop software?" This guide is a complementary resource to the others, providing a working template of how you should use git in order to deliver...

11 min readRead more →
How Not To Do a Hackathon
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How Not To Do a Hackathon

I'm a strong believer in learning by doing. I don't think it's necessarily the best way to learn because you invariably learn inefficiently, repeating well known mistakes and suboptimal practices. If you have a mentor throughout the learning process they can lead you away from bad habits and, crucially, explain why they're bad in the first place. But there are plus points to learning by doing. Firstly, you can't argue with the results. It's not a theoretical endeavour and if you manage to build a bookcase in two weeks, you can be fairly certain you've learnt a thing or two...

7 min readRead more →
Helping a stranger (and why you should understand NP-complete)
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Helping a stranger (and why you should understand NP-complete)

Earlier this year I helped out a random Hacker News commenter. This was covered in a recent blog post where I discussed the trade off between being an expert or a generalist. Realising my GitHub repository was littered with short, generalist introductions and experiments, I concluded that I should add the complex NP-complete constraint solver I had been working on for the past few years - an area in which I had some expertise. At least, I thought that was the conclusion. Help comes at a great cost, you must first ask for it Hacker News isn't just about start...

21 min readRead more →
Designing your wedding ring with 13 year old code
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Designing your wedding ring with 13 year old code

So often when faced with a programming task, you never truly solve the required problem from scratch. To be completely pedantic you're not writing processor instructions or even assembler but rather high level programming commands that are compiled or interpreted depending on your language choice. But with more and more tools available today to make the job easier, a lot of the necessary knowledge and skills aren't so much about how to programmatically break down and solve problems - it's just as much about knowing how to use all the tools out there. I love it when I've developed with...

12 min readRead more →