Pretending to be a professional wedding photographer with my Fujifilm X100V
and lessons learnt
Ronan Laker
Data scientist with a space physics PhD
Latest posts
Using duckdb with LLMs
At VIOOH, part of my job is to explain why our mixed-integer linear program, the “VIOOH allocation engine” (VAE), made the decisions it did. To help speed up my own investigations into bugs, I built a shiny web app to translate the dense .json files into a curated display of the objectives, screens and availability. As the tool developed, more and more technical plots/summaries were added that…
Modelling time series as a language
and why it sort of just *works*
Publishing my Obsidian cooking vault as a static site
Another thing Claude has solved for me
Showing my Unsplash gallery on my blog
How I embedded my Unsplash photos on my Jekyll site without exposing an API key
TIL: Hidden Markov Model
While doing research for a consulting project that sadly went nowhere (classifying rock type by core samples if you’re asking), I discovered Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). Weather example Imagine we want to classify the state of weather, as us British are wont to do, based on the Temperature (C) and Humidity (%). We might design a naive model that could classify the three different states (Sunny,…
In London you are always within 878m of a pub
I went to a PyData meetup the other day and heard Ben Guerin tell the story behind his viral website ismypubfucked.com , which does what it says on the tin (his joke). That got me thinking, at any given time in London, how far away from a pub am I? Well, to answer that we need to create a fine grid of query points across London and then find the closest pub at each point by comparing distances.…
First world Python environment problem
and a thinly veiled humble brag
A year of eating like the French
I made French food my culinary focus of last year. Each time I wanted a “project” to cook at the weekend, I made it my mission to recreate French classics I saw on YouTube. While I didn’t quite make it to recreating Pierre Koffman’s pig trotters, which two of my favourite cooking channels did within a week of each other ( Fallow and Adam Byatt ), I am pretty proud of the things I managed to make.…
Logs to the rescue
I’ve always been partial to a few print statements when debugging my personal coding projects. Now, having worked on code behind an API, I have come to appreciate the benefit of switching print() for logger.info . It only takes a few lines to set the root logger configuration, which adds useful metadata to every debugging message: import logging import jsonlogger logger = logging.getLogger(name)…