November 7, 2016

Data Science In the Balanced Team

This year I was fortunate enough to speak at PyCon Ireland 2016 in Dublin. This was a great event with lots of interesting Python based talks and a full PyData track over the two days. The topic of my talk was something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few years: how data scientists can work with other disciplines. Recently designers and product managers have begun working more closely with development teams, and in my opinion there are many lessons that data scientists can learn from this experience.

November 17, 2015

Towards Cloud Native Data Science

In my talk at ODSC West I wanted to start a conversation about what if any value the idea of Cloud Native Applications has for data science. The video and slides from my presentation are below and the slides are also available without speaker notes.

If you haven’t heard of Cloud Native Applications, the idea is to write applications that take full advantage of the benefits of cloud deployment and understand the limitations and constraints of the platform.

November 16, 2015

ODSC West Day Two

After a great first day, ODSC West started up again on a blustery Sunday morning in the Bay Area. As I needed to prepare for my own talk I didn’t get to see as many of the other sessions as I would have liked, but I’ve collected some thoughts on those that I did see.

November 15, 2015

ODSC West Day One

I’m out in San Francisco for the first time in months, to speak at the first Bay Area edition of the Open Data Science Conference. For a relatively new conference there is a great line-up of speakers and the audience is already quite big with around 1000 data scientists attending.

June 1, 2015

CF Summit Talk on Data Science

A few weeks ago I was able to attend this year’s Cloud Foundry Summit, the conference for all things Cloud Foundry in Santa Clara, California. The event was a great success with lots of interesting talks from developers, operators and customers of CF, and the organisation of the conference itself was splendid, including one of the best exhibition halls I’ve seen, complete with ping pong tables, arcade games and delicious food.

February 9, 2015

Data Science & XP Explained: Practices

In the previous two posts in this series we have explored the values and principles outlined in Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck and Cynthia Anders (XP Explained). In this post we will discuss perhaps the most contentious of the three layers: practices.

What relevance do XP practices have for data scientists? What are the benefits and disadvantages of these practices? Are there any that we should modify for a data science environment?

January 30, 2015

Data Science & XP Explained: Principles

The values described in Extreme Programming Explained are the foundation on which principles and practices are built. Last time we started to talk about those values through the lens of data science.

Today I’m going to describe some of the principles outlined by Beck and Anders, again asking whether they are applicable to data science, and whether data science could benefit from their application.

January 29, 2015

Cloud Foundry for Data Science talk

I’m excited to be giving a talk at the Data Science Lab meetup which has recently started in London. The topic is going to be how to use the open source Cloud Foundry platform for data science.

January 23, 2015

Data Science & Extreme Programming Explained

A new event in the Pivotal London office this week was our first lunchtime book club meeting. The first book suggested for discussion was Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres' Extreme Programming (XP) Explained (2nd Edition).

This is a classic of the agile programming community and Kent Beck’s shorter first edition (1999) can lay claim to being one of the first books about agile programming practices. In this long post I’m going to start discussing the message of the book, and how I think some of the ideas apply in the world of data science. [Update: The next parts of this post about principles and practices are now up.]

November 22, 2014

Python on Cloud Foundry

I’m very happy to be giving a talk at the latest PyData conference in New York this weekend.

This is a long post but I wanted a place to collect all the code I am showing in my talk and to provide a few more resources for those interested in trying out Python on Cloud Foundry further.

Resources

Simple Flask app
Slides from the talk
My new Cloud Foundry buildpack using conda
Video of Flask app deployment
Update: Video of PyData NY talk

What is Cloud Foundry?

My talk is about how to use Python and the PyData stack on Cloud Foundry the open source cloud platform. Cloud Foundry started life at VMware and development transferred to Pivotal when it was formed. Cloud Foundry has grown much bigger since then with over 30 companies joining together to form the Cloud Foundry Foundation which will guide the development of the open source project.