Some books what I done read recently
Some books what I done read recently and one book that doesn't exist but I wish it did. Some books what I done read recently and one book that doesn't exist but I wish it did.
David Neuzerling
Personal blog of David Neuzerling. Data and AI people leader. Former data scientist, R engineer, and mathematician.
Latest posts
Painting Skaven with oils
My local wargaming club was hosting a _Warhammer: Age of Sigmar_ Spearhead tournament with a twist: if you could paint your entire army between the time the tournament was announced and when the tournament took place (about 2 months), your entry fee was waived. My local wargaming club was hosting......
Death, taxes, and tech workers hounding you to raise a ticket
Everyone hates ticketing systems. Everyone needs ticketing systems. Ticketing systems are often misused. Everyone hates ticketing systems. Everyone needs ticketing systems. Ticketing systems are often misused.
Wrangling LLM output with LangChain
The toughest prediction any data scientist makes is deciding which tools are worth learning. The explosion of generative AI only makes this harder. My prediction: LangChain is here to stay or, at least, the patterns behind it are. The toughest prediction any data scientist makes is deciding which......
Why I no longer code in my free time
Those of us who write code are an insecure bunch. Technology moves faster than any one human being can keep up. The threat of falling behind is real and can impact careers and earnings, and that's a terrifying thing. I studied a lot of tech concepts in my free time to try to stay relevant. Those ......
Plotting commute times with R and Google Maps
I'm house-hunting, and while I'd love to buy a 5-bedroom house with a pool 10 minutes walk from Flinders Street Station I probably can't afford that. So I need to take a broader look at Melbourne. I'm house-hunting, and while I'd love to buy a 5-bedroom house with a pool 10 minutes walk from Flin......
Exemplar: a prototype R package for data validation
I've been playing around with an idea for a new R package. I call it exemplar and here's how it works: I provide an example of what data should look like --- an exemplar. The package gives a function that checks to make sure that any new data looks the same. The generated function checks --- ......
My Machine Learning Process (Mistakes Included)
When I train a machine learning model in a blog post, I edit out all the mistakes. I make it seem like I had the perfect data I needed from the very start, and I never add a useless feature. This time, I want to train a model with all the mistakes and fruitless efforts included. When I train a ma......
Advent of Code 2021: A Julia Journal - Part 2
Advent of Code is an advent calendar for programming puzzles. I decided to tackle this year's set of 50 puzzles in Julia and journal my experiences along the way. I'm a beginner in Julia so I thought this would help me improve my skills. Advent of Code
Advent of Code 2021: A Julia Journal - Part 1
Advent of Code is an advent calendar for programming puzzles. I decided to tackle this year's set of 50 puzzles in Julia and journal my experiences along the way. I'm a beginner in Julia so I thought this would help me improve my skills. Advent of Code
Animated Unicode Plots with Julia
I love Julia's UnicodePlots.jl, a package for making pretty, colourful plots directly in the terminal. While playing around for Advent of Code I wrote a function to animate a sequence of Unicode plots. It's not much, but I couldn't find anything ...
Serverless, On-Demand, Parametrised R Markdown Reports with AWS Lambda
I have a URL with a colour parameter, like " ". When I go to this URL in my browser, an AWS Lambda instance takes that parameter and passes it to rmarkdown::render
I Tried to Improve how Metaflow Converts R to Python (and I Failed)
Metaflow is one of my favourite R packages. Actually, it's a Python module, but the R package provides a set of bindings for running R code through Metaflow. Recently I've spent a good amount of effort trying to improve the way that R dat...
Over-engineering an Environment Sensor with Kubernetes and Prometheus
One of the joys of keeping a personal blog is that I don't have to justify a post. If I want to hook up 4 Raspberry Pis into a Kubernetes cluster just to monitor the humidity of my living room, then I can. One of the joys of keeping a personal blog is that I don't have to justify a post. If I wan......
Identifying Custom Australian Licence Plates
In case this saves anyone some time, here's a quick bit of regex and Python code for identifying if a given licence plate is standard or custom (personalised) in a given state. In case this saves anyone some time, here's a quick bit of regex and Python code for identifying if a given licence plat......
Everybody Loves Raymond: Running Animal Crossing Villagers through the Google Vision API
The Animal Crossing Portal is a fan site that runs a monthly poll on favourite villagers. They keep historical data in publicly available Google Sheets, which makes a data scientist like me very happy. The Animal Crossing Portal
Some Dockerfiles for Building R Package Binaries
I went down a strange path recently, trying to compile binaries of R packages for Linux. I'm not sure why --- this area is pretty much covered by the RStudio Package Manager. I'll leave my Dockerfiles here in case they're of any use to a future wayw...
Machine Learning Workflows with Julia
I have a simple machine learning workflow that I recreate whenever I'm testing something new. I take some interesting data and a target, throw in some pre-processing, tune hyperparameters with cross-validation, and train a random forest. It's all the basic ingredients for a machine learning model......
Using Metaflow to Make Model Tuning Less Painful
I have a machine learning model that takes some time to train. Data pre-processing and model fitting can take 15--20 minutes. That's not so bad, but I also want to tune my model to make sure I'm using the best hyper-parameters. With 16 different combinations of hyperparameters and 5-fold cross-va......
R on AWS Lambda with Containers
AWS has announced support for container images for their serverless computing platform Lambda. AWS doesn't provide an R runtime for Lambda, and this was the excuse I needed to finally try to make one. [AWS has annou...