Making, engineering, and community.
PyData London is a conference bringing together data scientists and engineers from all over the world for workshops and talks covering everything from document parsing to weather forecasting. This was my fourth year volunteering and I was really excited for the conference, not least because Aiven would be sponsoring this
I have a habit of setting myself ambitious if slightly wacky goals: riding the London to Brighton bike ride, building an ASCII art photobooth , pursuing a career in dev rel etc and my latest is no exception. One of my aims for 2026 was to give back to the Python
Follow up video to my blog on my homelab getting hacked , covering how I secured Umami with Tailscale. Photo credit Ellie Geddis .
I've been into homelabbing for a few years now. For those unaware, a homelab is a self managed IT environment, typically used for hosting apps and learning, which in practice usually means a hodgepodge of compute, storage, and networking. Here's my homelab: Here's the
Gathering data, building maps, and the places that it can take you I really like maps. I collect (mostly transit) maps and, when sitting down to write this blog, I quickly ran out of fingers counting all the maps up on the wall in my flat. Maps have an ability
Revisiting 2025 through projects made.
How I used Aiven's free Kafka tier to monitor my smart bird feeder in real-time
I decided to migrate my simple static Jekyll site to Ghost Blog: a powerful open-source blog and newsletter platform.
I was lucky enough to attend and speak at this years Big Data Europe event in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Amateur hour game dev, Faustian bargains with AI, and trying to do my actual job.
I was given this Anaconda stress ball at PyCon UK by the amazing Dawn Wages . I think because of having spent so much time working with stress gauges earlier this year as part of my bird feeder project my first thought was “can I add a stress-sensor to this-stress
I just wrapped up an incredible two days at the All Things Open Conference in Raleigh, and I'm still buzzing from the experience (though admittedly quite jet-lagged as I make my way back to London for the Dremio Subsurface conference). Day Two: Finding My Rhythm I joined the
Update: After some feedback I manually relabeled my data and changed my approach slightly for better graphs By popular request here's all the data I collected from my smart bird feeder in histogram form: This is my first time trying Marimo and I really liked using it for
I’ve spent a lot of time and energy this year complaining about Meetup ( at the CodeBar Festival Fringe , at PyCon UK , and on my blog ). Meetup is becoming more expensive, less reliable, and generally ‘ enshittified ’ which came to a head at the beginning of this year
I had a great time at my first PyCon UK over the weekend: the community was really friendly and I feel like I missed as many good talks as I saw which feels the mark of a good conference to me. Day One: Highlights 🐍 I started the day with