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...
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......
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......
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
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...
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......
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......
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...
Locking down R package dependencies and versions is a solved problem, thanks to the easy-to-use renv package. System dependencies --- those Linux packages that need to be installed to make certain R packages work --- are a bit harder to manage. Locking down R package dependencies and versions i......
I've set myself an ambitious goal of building a Kubernetes cluster out of a couple of Raspberry Pis. This is pretty far out of my sphere of knowledge, so I have a lot to learn. I'll be writing some posts to publish my notes and journal my experience publicly. In this post I'll go through the basi......