Just a quick reminder that you’ve only got until next Tuesday to bid for a day’s work from me – so get bidding here. The full details and rules are available in my previous post, but basically I’ll do a day’s work for the highest bidder in this auction – working on coding, data science, […]
Author: Robin Wilson
Bid for a day’s work from me
Summary: I will do a day’s work for the highest bidder in this auction. This could mean you get a day’s work from me very cheaply. Please read all of this post carefully, and then submit your bid here before 5th Feb. This experiment is based very heavily on David MacIver’s experiment in auctioning off […]
I give talks – on science, programming and more
The quick summary of this post is: I give talks. You might like them. Here are some details of talks I’ve done. Feel free to invite me to speak to your group – contact me at robin@rtwilson.com. Read on for more details. I enjoy giving talks on a variety of subjects to a range of […]
PyCon UK 2018: My thoughts – including childcare review
As I mentioned in the previous post, I attended – and spoke at – PyCon UK 2018 in Cardiff. Last time I provided a link to my talk on xarray – this time I want to provide some general thoughts on the conference, some suggested talks to watch, and a particular comment on the creche/childcare […]
PyCon UK 2018: My talk on xarray
Last week I attended PyCon UK 2018 in Cardiff, and had a great time. I’m going to write a few posts about this conference – and this first one is focused on my talk. I spoke in the ‘PyData’ track, with a talk entitled XArray: the power of pandas for multidimensional arrays. PyCon UK always do […]
BankClassify: simple automatic classification of bank statement entries
This is another entry in my ‘Previously Unpublicised Code’ series – explanations of code that has been sitting on my Github profile for ages, but has never been discussed publicly before. This time, I’m going to talk about BankClassify a tool for classifying transactions on bank statements into categories like Supermarket, Eating Out and Mortgage automatically. It is an […]
Blogroll
I really enjoy reading blogs. That seems to be a slightly outdated view, as many people have moved over to using Twitter exclusively, but I like being able to follow everything that a specific person writes, and seeing mostly long-form articles rather than off-the-cuff comments. Back in the day, when blogs were really popular, every […]
Regression in Python using R-style formula – it’s easy!
I remember experimenting with doing regressions in Python using R-style formulae a long time ago, and I remember it being a bit complicated. Luckily it’s become really easy now – and I’ll show you just how easy. Before running this you will need to install the pandas, statsmodels and patsy packages. If you’re using conda […]
Reminder about cross-platform case-sensitivity differences
This is just a very brief reminder about something you might run into when you’re trying to get your code to work on multiple platforms – in this case, OS X, Linux and Windows. Basically: file names/paths are case-sensitive on Linux, but not on OS X or Windows. Therefore, you could have some Python code […]
‘Got multiple values for argument’ error with keyword arguments in Python classes
This is a quick post to brief describe a problem I ran into the other day when trying to debug someone’s code – the answer may be entirely obvious to you, but it took me a while to work out, so I thought I’d document it here. The problem that I was called over to […]
Showing code changes when teaching
A key – but challenging – part of learning to program is moving from writing technically-correct code “that works” to writing high-quality code that is sensibly decomposed into functions, generically-applicable and generally “good”. Indeed, you could say that this is exactly what Software Carpentry is about – taking you from someone bodging together a few […]
Reading AERONET data in Pandas: a simple helper function
I use data from the AERONET network of sun photometers a lot in my work, and do a lot of processing of the data in Python. As part of this I usually want to load the data into pandas – but because of the format of the data, it’s not quite as simple as it […]
Conda revisions: letting you ‘rollback’ to a previous version of your environment
I now use Anaconda as my primary Python distribution – and my company have also adopted it for use on all of their developer machines as well as their servers – so I like to think I’m a relatively knowledgeable user. However, the other day I came across a wonderful feature that I’d never known about […]
Data sources for parameterising Radiative Transfer Models & atmospheric correction algorithms
There was a question recently on the Py6S mailing list about what data sources are best to use to provide atmospheric parameters (such as AOT, water vapour and ozone) for use with 6S, other atmospheric Radiative Transfer Models (such as MODTRAN) or other atmospheric correction algorithms (such as ATCOR). In the spirit of ‘reply to […]
Non-traditional references to my work – and why they’re important
If someone wants to see how many times my work has been referenced, they’d probably go and look at my citation statistics, for example on my Google Scholar profile. At the time of writing, that shows that I have 16 citations overall, and a h-index of 2. However, I don’t think this tells the whole […]